Poems (Dudley)/Wed or Dead

by Marion Vienna Churchill Dudley

WED OR DEAD?

YOU may talk of the bridal marches
 And say that you saw him wed,
But I heard through the chancel's arches
 A dirge for the early dead;

You may tell of a gay reception;
 Of "blushes," of "bride and groom,"
But I saw through the rich deception
 A pall and the hearse and the tomb;

You tell me that Reuben has married
 A fortune, position and birth;
I tell you that Reuben has buried
 Himself beneath dust of the earth;

I could hear above all intoning
 Of Priest and the organ's refrain,
The cold clods on his coffin-lid falling,—
 Position and fortune and gain:

"But he smiled," do you say, in greeting,
 "And lifted his head in pride?"
It is true that his heart is beating;
 His soul—'twas his soul that died;

As the hectic of life burns reddest,
 On cheeks while their death-bells toll,
So the man is by far the deadest
 Whose body outlives his soul;

But, you urge, he was "lawfully wedded;"
 He might have been "lawfully" hung:
The law is a thing to be dreaded
 When the headsman's axe is swung;

Nut the heart, you may starve or stone it,
 And if it be "lawfully" dead,
Not a soul that will pause to bemoan it,—
 A heart does not weigh with a head.

There is law, that unwritten, unspoken,
 Holds man to its iron creed,
And its sentence is death if once broken
 In thought, or in word, or in deed;

And this mystical law of the spirit
 It was that our Reuben denied,
When he stood where high heaven could hear it
 Before that great altar and lied.

When he promised to love and to cherish
 That girl in the satin and sheen,
'Twas the dirge of a manliness perished
 That rang from the choir unseen.

For there walks in the triumph of sorrow,
 A woman whose smile can unfold,
More heaven than Reuben will borrow
 From millions of pride-wedded gold.

Though he tread where the proudest have risen,
 The glance of his eye is in chains;
The smile on his lip is 1n prison,
 His heart-beat, a captive, complains.

O! the sadness of dying is never
 When honor and truth have gone home,
But the madness of living to sever
 One's soul from its heritage throne.

To see one's own funeral passing;
 To hear one's own requiem toll;
Ah, Reuben was chief of the mourners
 That day when we buried his soul!

So you talk of the bridal marches
 And say that you saw him wed;
I hear through the heart's high arches
 A dirge for the early dead.