Poems (Hoffman)/The Seaside Cemetery

by Martha Lavinia Hoffman

THE SEASIDE CEMETERY

This is no silent city of the dead,
 No soundless crypt;
No charnel-house (whence light and song have fled)
 For gloom equipped.
No hidden, darksome, life-deserted spot
 Of bloom bereft.

Where silent desolation, changing not,
 Alone is left.
A city, looking from its sloping hill
 Toward the sea;
A picture, blooming fresh and lovely
 In memory.
Here droop bright fuchsias in a glowing hedge
 Of brightness set,
And blue lobelias fringe the border's edge
 With dewdrops wet;
While pelargoniums, with deep color stained
 Make glad the ground;
And the green ivy clambers, unrestrained
 O'er slab and mound,
And queenly roses and rich purple blooms
 In freshness glow,
Dropping their fading petals on the tombs
 That sleep below.
The white fogs hover o'er with silent wings,
 Like guardian hosts
When early morn her misty mantle flings
 Along the coasts;
And the glad sunbeams fall, like melted gold
 In shining pools;
While the hot noontide's burning, brazen scroll
 The seabreeze cools;
And over all a deep and mighty surge
 Forever swells,
The wondrous ocean's ceaseless, solemn dirge
 Time never quells;
As if the sea's great palpitating heart
 Remembered yet,
The silent dwellers, as the years depart
 And friends forget.
Were it not beautiful to slumber here
 Not all unsung;
But chanted of by one forever near
 In Nature's tongue?
Sleep, peaceful dwellers, by the lovely shore;
 Though life hath fled,
The throbbing, solemn ocean nevermore
 Forgets the dead.