Seven Sonnets on the Thought of Death1

I     That children in their loveliness should die     Before the dawning beauty, which we know     Cannot remain, has yet begun to go;     That when a certain period has passed by,     People of genius and of faculty,     Leaving behind them some result to show,     Having performed some function, should forego     The task which younger hands can better ply,     Appears entirely natural. But that one     Whose perfectness did not at all consist     In things towards forming which time can have done     Anything, whose sole office was to exist,     Should suddenly dissolve and cease to be     Is the extreme of all perplexity. II     That there are better things within the womb     Of Nature than to our unworthy view     She grants for a possession, may be true:     The cycle of the birthplace and the tomb     Fulfils at least the order and the doom     Of earth, that has not ordinance to do     More than to withdraw and to renew,     To show one moment and the next resume:     The law that we return from whence we came,     May for the flowers, beasts, and most men remain;     If for ourselves, we ask not nor complain:     But for a being that demands the name     We highest deem, a Person and a Soul,     It troubles us that this should be the whole. III     To see the rich autumnal tint depart,     And view the fading of the roseate glow     That veils some Alpine altitude of snow,     To hear of some great masterpiece of art     Lost or destroyed, may to the adult heart     Impatient of the transitory show     Of lovelinesses that but come and go,     A positive strange thankfulness impart.     When human pure perfections disappear,     Not at the first, but at some later day,     The buoyancy of such reaction may     With strong assurance conquer blank dismay. IV     But whether in the uncoloured light of truth,     This inward strong assurance be, indeed,     More than the self-willed arbitrary creed,     Manhoods inheritor to the dream of youth;     Whether to shut out fact because forsooth     To live were insupportable unfreed,     Be not or be the service of untruth:     Whether this vital confidence be more     Than his, who upon deaths immediate brink,     Knowing, perforce determines to ignore;     Or than the birds, that when the hunters near,     Burying her eyesight, can forget her fear;     Who about this shall tell us what to think? V     If it is thou whose casual hand withdraws     What it at first as casually did make,     Say what amount of ages it will take     With tardy rare concurrences of laws,     And subtle multiplicities of cause,     The thing they once had made us to remake;     May hopes dead slumbering dare to reawake,     Een after utmost interval of pause,     What revolutions must have passed, before     The great celestial cycles shall restore     The starry sign whose present hour is gone;     What worse than dubious chances interpose,     With cloud and sunny gleam to recompose     The skiey picture we had gazed upon. VI     But if as not by that the soul desired     Swayed in the judgment, wisest men have thought,     And furnishing the evidence it sought,     Mans heart hath ever fervently required,     And story, for that reason deemed inspired,     To every clime, in every age, hath taught;     If in this human complex there be aught     Not lost in death, as not in birth acquired,     O then, though cold the lips that did convey     Rich freights of meaning, dead each living sphere.     Where thought abode, and fancy loved to play,     Thou yet, we think, somewhere somehow still art,     And satisfied with that the patient heart     The where and how doth not desire to hear. VII     Shall I decide it by a random shot?     Our happy hopes, so happy and so good,     Are not mere idle motions of the blood;     And when they seem most baseless, most are not.     A seed there must have been upon the spot     Where the flowers grow, without it neer they could;     The confidence of growth least understood     Of some deep intuition was begot.     What if despair and hope alike be true?     The heart, tis manifest, is free to do     Whichever Nature and itself suggest,     And always tis a fact that we are here,     And with being here, doth palsy-giving fear     (Whoeer can ask or hope) accord the best?