In Clonmel Parish Churchyard

Where the graves were many, we looked for one.   Oh, the Irish rose was red, And the dark stones saddened the setting sun   With the names of the early dead. Then, a child who, somehow, had heard of him   In the land we love so well, Kept lifting the grass till the dew was dim   In the churchyard of Clonmel. But the sexton came. “Can you tell us where   Charles Wolfe is buried?” “I can. —See, that is his grave in the corner there.   (Ay, he was a clever man, If God had spared him!) It ’s many that come   To be asking for him,” said he. But the boy kept whispering, “Not a drum   Was heard,”—in the dusk to me. (Then the gray man tore a vine from the wall   Of the roofless church where he lay, And the leaves that the withering year let fall   He swept, with the ivy, away; And, as we read on the rock the words   That, writ in the moss, we found, Right over his bosom a shower of birds   In music fell to the ground.) … Young poet, I wonder did you care,   Did it move you in your rest To hear that child in his golden hair,   From the mighty woods of the West, Repeating your verse of his own sweet will,   To the sound of the twilight bell, Years after your beating heart was still   In the churchyard of Clonmel?