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IN MEMORIAM A.H.H.
[Arthur Hugh Hallam]
OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII.
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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- XLI.
- The path by which we twain did go,
- Which led by tracts that pleased us well,
- Thro' four sweet years arose and fell,
- From flower to flower, from snow to snow:
- And we with singing cheer'd the way,
- And, crown'd with all the season lent,
- From April on to April went,
- And glad at heart from May to May:
- But where the path we walk'd began
- To slant the fifth autumnal slope,
- As we descended following Hope,
- There sat the Shadow fear'd of man;
- The spirit ere our fatal loss
- Did ever rise from high to higher;
- As mounts the heavenward altar-fire,
- As flies the lighter thro' the gross.
- But thou art turn'd to something strange,
- And I have lost the links that bound
- Thy changes; here upon the ground,
- No more partaker of thy change.
- Deep folly! yet that this could be-
- That I could wing my will with might
- To leap the grades of life and light,
- And flash at once, my friend, to thee.
- For tho' my nature rarely yields
- To that vague fear implied in death;
- Nor shudders at the gulfs beneath,
- The howlings from forgotten fields;
- Yet oft when sundown skirts the moor
- An inner trouble I behold,
- A spectral doubt which makes me cold,
- That I shall be thy mate no more,
- Tho' following with an upward mind
- The wonders that have come to thee,
- Thro' all the secular to-be,
- But evermore a life behind.
- XLII.
- I vex my heart with fancies dim:
- He still outstript me in the race;
- It was but unity of place
- That made me dream I rank'd with him.
- And so may Place retain us still,
- And he the much-beloved again,
- A lord of large experience, train
- To riper growth the mind and will:
- And what delights can equal those
- That stir the spirit's inner deeps,
- When one that loves but knows not, reaps
- A truth from one that loves and knows?
- XLIII.
- If Sleep and Death be truly one,
- And every spirit's folded bloom
- Thro' all its intervital gloom
- In some long trance should slumber on;
- Unconscious of the sliding hour,
- Bare of the body, might it last,
- And silent traces of the past
- Be all the colour of the flower:
- So then were nothing lost to man;
- So that still garden of the souls
- In many a figured leaf enrolls
- The total world since life began;
- And love will last as pure and whole
- As when he loved me here in Time,
- And at the spiritual prime
- Rewaken with the dawning soul.
- XLIV.
- How fares it with the happy dead?
- For here the man is more and more;
- But he forgets the days before
- God shut the doorways of his head.
- The days have vanish'd, tone and tint,
- And yet perhaps the hoarding sense
- Gives out at times (he knows not whence)
- A little flash, a mystic hint;
- And in the long harmonious years
- (If Death so taste Lethean springs),
- May some dim touch of earthly things
- Surprise thee ranging with thy peers.
- If such a dreamy touch should fall,
- O turn thee round, resolve the doubt;
- My guardian angel will speak out
- In that high place, and tell thee all.
- XLV.
- The baby new to earth and sky,
- What time his tender palm is prest
- Against the circle of the breast,
- Has never thought that 'this is I:'
- But as he grows he gathers much,
- And learns the use of 'I,' and 'me,'
- And finds 'I am not what I see,
- And other than the things I touch.'
- So rounds he to a separate mind
- From whence clear memory may begin,
- As thro' the frame that binds him in
- His isolation grows defined.
- This use may lie in blood and breath,
- Which else were fruitless of their due,
- Had man to learn himself anew
- Beyond the second birth of Death.
- XLVI.
- We ranging down this lower track,
- The path we came by, thorn and flower,
- Is shadow'd by the growing hour,
- Lest life should fail in looking back.
- So be it: there no shade can last
- In that deep dawn behind the tomb,
- But clear from marge to marge shall bloom
- The eternal landscape of the past;
- A lifelong tract of time reveal'd;
- The fruitful hours of still increase;
- Days order'd in a wealthy peace,
- And those five years its richest field.
- O Love, thy province were not large,
- A bounded field, nor stretching far;
- Look also, Love, a brooding star,
- A rosy warmth from marge to marge.
- XLVII.
- That each, who seems a separate whole,
- Should move his rounds, and fusing all
- The skirts of self again, should fall
- Remerging in the general Soul,
- Is faith as vague as all unsweet:
- Eternal form shall still divide
- The eternal soul from all beside;
- And I shall know him when we meet:
- And we shall sit at endless feast,
- Enjoying each the other's good:
- What vaster dream can hit the mood
- Of Love on earth? He seeks at least
- Upon the last and sharpest height,
- Before the spirits fade away,
- Some landing-place, to clasp and say,
- 'Farewell! We lose ourselves in light.'
- XLVIII.
- If these brief lays, of Sorrow born,
- Were taken to be such as closed
- Grave doubts and answers here proposed,
- Then these were such as men might scorn:
- Her care is not to part and prove;
- She takes, when harsher moods remit,
- What slender shade of doubt may flit,
- And makes it vassal unto love:
- And hence, indeed, she sports with words,
- But better serves a wholesome law,
- And holds it sin and shame to draw
- The deepest measure from the chords:
- Nor dare she trust a larger lay,
- But rather loosens from the lip
- Short swallow-flights of song, that dip
- Their wings in tears, and skim away.
- XLIX.
- From art, from nature, from the schools,
- Let random influences glance,
- Like light in many a shiver'd lance
- That breaks about the dappled pools:
- The lightest wave of thought shall lisp,
- The fancy's tenderest eddy wreathe,
- The slightest air of song shall breathe
- To make the sullen surface crisp.
- And look thy look, and go thy way,
- But blame not thou the winds that make
- The seeming-wanton ripple break,
- The tender-pencil'd shadow play.
- Beneath all fancied hopes and fears
- Ay me, the sorrow deepens down,
- Whose muffled motions blindly drown
- The bases of my life in tears.
- L.
- Be near me when my light is low,
- When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
- And tingle; and the heart is sick,
- And all the wheels of Being slow.
- Be near me when the sensuous frame
- Is rack'd with pangs that conquer trust;
- And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
- And Life, a Fury slinging flame.
- Be near me when my faith is dry,
- And men the flies of latter spring,
- That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
- And weave their petty cells and die.
- Be near me when I fade away,
- To point the term of human strife,
- And on the low dark verge of life
- The twilight of eternal day.
- LI.
- Do we indeed desire the dead
- Should still be near us at our side?
- Is there no baseness we would hide?
- No inner vileness that we dread?
- Shall he for whose applause I strove,
- I had such reverence for his blame,
- See with clear eye some hidden shame
- And I be lessen'd in his love?
- I wrong the grave with fears untrue:
- Shall love be blamed for want of faith?
- There must be wisdom with great Death:
- The dead shall look me thro' and thro'.
- Be near us when we climb or fall:
- Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours
- With larger other eyes than ours,
- To make allowance for us all.
- LII.
- I cannot love thee as I ought,
- For love reflects the thing beloved;
- My words are only words, and moved
- Upon the topmost froth of thought.
- 'Yet blame not thou thy plaintive song,'
- The Spirit of true love replied;
- 'Thou canst not move me from thy side,
- Nor human frailty do me wrong.
- 'What keeps a spirit wholly true
- To that ideal which he bears?
- What record? not the sinless years
- That breathed beneath the Syrian blue:
- 'So fret not, like an idle girl,
- That life is dash'd with flecks of sin.
- Abide: thy wealth is gather'd in,
- When Time hath sunder'd shell from pearl.'
- LIII.
- How many a father have I seen,
- A sober man, among his boys,
- Whose youth was full of foolish noise,
- Who wears his manhood hale and green:
- And dare we to this fancy give,
- That had the wild oat not been sown,
- The soil, left barren, scarce had grown
- The grain by which a man may live?
- Or, if we held the doctrine sound
- For life outliving heats of youth,
- Yet who would preach it as a truth
- To those that eddy round and round?
- Hold thou the good: define it well:
- For fear divine Philosophy
- Should push beyond her mark, and be
- Procuress to the Lords of Hell.
- LIV.
- Oh yet we trust that somehow good
- Will be the final goal of ill,
- To pangs of nature, sins of will,
- Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;
- That nothing walks with aimless feet;
- That not one life shall be destroy'd,
- Or cast as rubbish to the void,
- When God hath made the pile complete;
- That not a worm is cloven in vain;
- That not a moth with vain desire
- Is shrivell'd in a fruitless fire,
- Or but subserves another's gain.
- Behold, we know not anything;
- I can but trust that good shall fall
- At last-far off-at last, to all,
- And every winter change to spring.
- So runs my dream: but what am I?
- An infant crying in the night:
- An infant crying for the light:
- And with no language but a cry.
- LV.
- The wish, that of the living whole
- No life may fail beyond the grave,
- Derives it not from what we have
- The likest God within the soul?
- Are God and Nature then at strife,
- That Nature lends such evil dreams?
- So careful of the type she seems,
- So careless of the single life;
- That I, considering everywhere
- Her secret meaning in her deeds,
- And finding that of fifty seeds
- She often brings but one to bear,
- I falter where I firmly trod,
- And falling with my weight of cares
- Upon the great world's altar-stairs
- That slope thro' darkness up to God,
- I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
- And gather dust and chaff, and call
- To what I feel is Lord of all,
- And faintly trust the larger hope.
- LVI.
- 'So careful of the type?' but no.
- From scarped cliff and quarried stone
- She cries, 'A thousand types are gone:
- I care for nothing, all shall go.
- 'Thou makest thine appeal to me:
- I bring to life, I bring to death:
- The spirit does but mean the breath:
- I know no more.' And he, shall he,
- Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,
- Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
- Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,
- Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
- Who trusted God was love indeed
- And love Creation's final law-
- Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
- With ravine, shriek'd against his creed-
- Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills,
- Who battled for the True, the Just,
- Be blown about the desert dust,
- Or seal'd within the iron hills?
- No more? A monster then, a dream,
- A discord. Dragons of the prime,
- That tare each other in their slime,
- Were mellow music match'd with him.
- O life as futile, then, as frail!
- O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
- What hope of answer, or redress?
- Behind the veil, behind the veil.
- LVII.
- Peace; come away: the song of woe
- Is after all an earthly song:
- Peace; come away: we do him wrong
- To sing so wildly: let us go.
- Come; let us go: your cheeks are pale;
- But half my life I leave behind:
- Methinks my friend is richly shrined;
- But I shall pass; my work will fail.
- Yet in these ears, till hearing dies,
- One set slow bell will seem to toll
- The passing of the sweetest soul
- That ever look'd with human eyes.
- I hear it now, and o'er and o'er,
- Eternal greetings to the dead;
- And 'Ave, Ave, Ave,' said,
- 'Adieu, adieu' for evermore.
- LVIII.
- In those sad words I took farewell:
- Like echoes in sepulchral halls,
- As drop by drop the water falls
- In vaults and catacombs, they fell;
- And, falling, idly broke the peace
- Of hearts that beat from day to day,
- Half-conscious of their dying clay,
- And those cold crypts where they shall cease.
- The high Muse answer'd: 'Wherefore grieve
- Thy brethren with a fruitless tear?
- Abide a little longer here,
- And thou shalt take a nobler leave.'
- LIX.
- O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me
- No casual mistress, but a wife,
- My bosom-friend and half of life;
- As I confess it needs must be;
- O Sorrow, wilt thou rule my blood,
- Be sometimes lovely like a bride,
- And put thy harsher moods aside,
- If thou wilt have me wise and good.
- My centred passion cannot move,
- Nor will it lessen from to-day;
- But I'll have leave at times to play
- As with the creature of my love;
- And set thee forth, for thou art mine,
- With so much hope for years to come,
- That, howsoe'er I know thee, some
- Could hardly tell what name were thine.
- LX.
- He past; a soul of nobler tone:
- My spirit loved and loves him yet,
- Like some poor girl whose heart is set
- On one whose rank exceeds her own.
- He mixing with his proper sphere,
- She finds the baseness of her lot,
- Half jealous of she knows not what,
- And envying all that meet him there.
- The little village looks forlorn;
- She sighs amid her narrow days,
- Moving about the household ways,
- In that dark house where she was born.
- The foolish neighbours come and go,
- And tease her till the day draws by:
- At night she weeps, 'How vain am I!
- How should he love a thing so low?'
to Verse LXI.
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