After the Burial

Yes, faith is a goodly anchor;   When skies are sweet as a psalm, At the bows it lolls so stalwart,   In its bluff, broad-shouldered calm. And when over breakers to leeward   The tattered surges are hurled, It may keep our head to the tempest,   With its grip on the base of the world. But, after the shipwreck, tell me   What help in its iron thews, Still true to the broken hawser,   Deep down among sea-weed and ooze? In the breaking gulfs of sorrow,   When the helpless feet stretch out And find in the deeps of darkness   No footing so solid as doubt, Then better one spar of Memory,   One broken plank of the Past, That our human heart may cling to,   Though hopeless of shore at last! To the spirit its splendid conjectures,   To the flesh its sweet despair, Its tears o’er the thin-worn locket   With its anguish of deathless hair! Immortal? I feel it and know it,   Who doubts it of such as she? But that is the pang’s very secret,—   Immortal away from me. There ’s a narrow ridge in the graveyard   Would scarce stay a child in his race, But to me and my thought it is wider   Than the star-sown vague of Space. Your logic, my friend, is perfect,   Your moral most drearily true; But, since the earth clashed on her coffin,   I keep hearing that, and not you. Console if you will, I can bear it;   ’T is a well-meant alms of breath; But not all the preaching since Adam   Has made Death other than Death. It is pagan; but wait till you feel it,—   That jar of our earth, that dull shock When the ploughshare of deeper passion   Tears down to our primitive rock. Communion in spirit! Forgive me,   But I, who am earthly and weak, Would give all my incomes from dream-land   For a touch of her hand on my cheek. That little shoe in the corner,   So worn and wrinkled and brown, With its emptiness confutes you,   And argues your wisdom down.