Form: a quarterly of the arts (1.1916/1917)

Death and the

T*hat they possess much deeper passion, more ex-
pansive reach of thought,

O majestic music speak more clearly yet, or utter
nought!

For when your insistence lessens, in the heart a
shadow calls—

“ Hearken not, believe it not, but stop the ears, for
it is false.”

FRANCIS BURROWS

DEATH

NLY to those in whom sweet life is
small

Can death be great and worthy to
be praised,

Only to those, but they are nearly all,
And death, their idol, on a cross is
Thereon the sick idolaters have gazed [raised.

Until their longing, colouring their sight,

Has seemed to find fulfillment. There, amazed,
They see their idol, dazzling in its light,

It darkens all their world and covers it with night.

All their own light, the keen imagined thought,
To Death is yielded. So the darkened mind,
With fears and fear-begotten monsters fraught
Becomes a prison wherein love’s confined.
Beauty, shut out, is pleasure’s hireling hind
And lives forgotten in a little room.

And joy, that love in beauty first divined,

May never sweeten man’s self-chosen doom,
Whose light is death to lure him from his wanton
gloom.

Manor House

*

All else denied, and never, never seen,

Seems mischievous creation for his woe.

The world is but a many-coloured screen
To hold the glory whither he shall go.

It is familar as a painted show,

Monotonous, too oft repeated, dull,

Gross and confused, unworthy him to know.

Behind the fairest beauty grins a skull
Each pleasure in attendant sorrow soon is null.

What then is Death, that all to him is given?
Whence came the power that raised him up so
high

And made him seem the seneschal of Heaven,
And called him Truth and Life a cruel lie?

Let us no more endure this tyranny.

Death that is nothing governs everything
And every human impulse is his spy,

Looking for winter in the heart of spring
Bemoaning joy with dirges on a muted string.

The starry eyes of children see no death
Nor any shadow on their sunny hours.

Delight they take with every easy breath

And laugh as joy their timeless life devours.
Nor time nor death upon their pleasure lours.

Their pleasure passes, passes like a cloud,

From pleasure drawn, to fall in pleasant showers.

Their sorrow’s self is but a shining shroud.
Behind it all the earth with chiming glee is loud.

And infinitely clear upon the mountains

And vibrant in the dales, child-spirits haunt
With lay s as pure as song of streams of fountains,
With ditties pure, a music resonant,

The scene the slaves of death, the adamant,

Defile and spoil and still pretend to scorn.
They mumble psalms and drearily they chant
The tale of how the King of Death was born
To make of eager life a servitude forlorn.

All, all for nought is spread the light of day,

So blessing sense, so fathoming the soul.

When childish glee in sight has passed away,
Then man through habit’s tunnel like a mole
Goes scratching onward to his mortal goal.

To reach the nothing which his kind adores,
To be no part but an eternal whole

In Death, all other purposes he ignores.

Men are no more than breakers on Death’s frozen
shores.

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