Poems (Shore)/A Requiem

by Louisa Catherine Shore

A REQUIEM

 

On reading some verses about a poor woman seen carrying the coffin of her infant in her arms to the burial.

So too, dead darlings of the past
 By disappointed souls are borne
 Beneath a sky not less forlorn,
Across as desolate a waste.

To no triumphant requiem,
 Some love or faith or fancy-crown
 Of genius we at last lay down,
And in deep silence bury them.

Perhaps for years we watched them die,
 Perhaps they died before we knew;
 Perhaps a violet or two
May yet spring up from where they lie.

Ah! some have laid their dead in earth
 Where gardens redden o'er with bloom,
 To flower from many a magic tomb
Into some new and lovelier birth.

There the first passion of the boy,
 Buried with all its beauteous folly,
 Sublimes to true love's melancholy,
Or true love's vivifying joy.

There rise the nobler dreams of youth,
 From childhood's fancies cast aside;
 Beliefs that had their day and died
Grow thence to grander forms of truth.

But they who drop by slow degrees,
 Gifted in vain, the best they have
 Deep in a cold and barren grave—
What shall we say to comfort these?

That happier selves shall gather flowers
 From hopes we sowed in ground that seemed
 So barren!—fairy tales e dreamed
Be true of other lives than ours?

That poems and that pictures, pent
 Once in our souls, shall yet escape,
 And in some new transcendent shape
Attain their full accomplishment?

Pray for all souls that mourn their dead—
 Pray for all souls that they may see
 A light from the great time to be
Already streak the East with red;

Behind whose twilight wait unseen
 A perfect earth, perfected man,
 To finish all that we began,
To be what we would fain have been.