Jubilate

"The very last time I ever was here," he said,     "I saw much less of the quick than I saw of the dead."     - He was a man I had met with somewhere before,     But how or when I now could recall no more.     "The hazy mazy moonlight at one in the morning     Spread out as a sea across the frozen snow,     Glazed to live sparkles like the great breastplate adorning     The priest of the Temple, with Urim and Thummim aglow.     "The yew-tree arms, glued hard to the stiff stark air,     Hung still in the village sky as theatre-scenes     When I came by the churchyard wall, and halted there     At a shut-in sound of fiddles and tambourines.     "And as I stood hearkening, dulcimers, haut-boys, and shawms,     And violoncellos, and a three-stringed double-bass,     Joined in, and were intermixed with a singing of psalms;     And I looked over at the dead men's dwelling-place.     "Through the shine of the slippery snow I now could see,     As it were through a crystal roof, a great company     Of the dead minueting in stately step underground     To the tune of the instruments I had before heard sound.     "It was 'Eden New,' and dancing they sang in a chore,     'We are out of it all! - yea, in Little-Ease cramped no more!'     And their shrouded figures pacing with joy I could see     As you see the stage from the gallery. And they had no heed of me.     "And I lifted my head quite dazed from the churchyard wall     And I doubted not that it warned I should soon have my call.     But - " . . . Then in the ashes he emptied the dregs of his cup,     And onward he went, and the darkness swallowed him up.