Memorial Verses on the Death of William Bell Scott

A life more bright than the sun's face, bowed     Through stress of season and coil of cloud,     Sets: and the sorrow that casts out fear     Scarce deems him dead in his chill still shroud,     Dead on the breast of the dying year,     Poet and painter and friend, thrice dear     For love of the suns long set, for love     Of song that sets not with sunset here,     For love of the fervent heart, above     Their sense who saw not the swift light move     That filled with sense of the loud sun's lyre     The thoughts that passion was fain to prove     In fervent labour of high desire     And faith that leapt from its own quenched pyre     Alive and strong as the sun, and caught     From darkness light, and from twilight fire.     Passion, deep as the depths unsought     Whence faith's own hope may redeem us nought,     Filled full with ardour of pain sublime     His mourning song and his mounting thought.     Elate with sense of a sterner time,     His hand's flight clomb as a bird's might climb     Calvary: dark in the darkling air     That shrank for fear of the crowning crime,     Three crosses rose on the hillside bare,     Shown scarce by grace of the lightning's glare     That clove the veil of the temple through     And smote the priests on the threshold there.     The soul that saw it, the hand that drew,     Whence light as thought's or as faith's glance flew,     And stung to life the sepulchral past,     And bade the stars of it burn anew,     Held no less than the dead world fast     The light live shadows about them cast,     The likeness living of dawn and night,     The days that pass and the dreams that last.     Thought, clothed round with sorrow as light,     Dark as a cloud that the moon turns bright,     Moved, as a wind on the striving sea,     That yearns and quickens and flags in flight,     Through forms of colour and song that he     Who fain would have set its wide wings free     Cast round it, clothing or chaining hope     With lights that last not and shades that flee.     Scarce in song could his soul find scope,     Scarce the strength of his hand might ope     Art's inmost gate of her sovereign shrine,     To cope with heaven as a man may cope.     But high as the hope of a man may shine     The faith, the fervour, the life divine     That thrills our life and transfigures, rose     And shone resurgent, a sunbright sign,     Through shapes whereunder the strong soul glows     And fills them full as a sunlit rose     With sense and fervour of life, whose light     The fool's eye knows not, the man's eye knows.     None that can read or divine aright     The scriptures writ of the soul may slight     The strife of a strenuous soul to show     More than the craft of the hand may write.     None may slight it, and none may know     How high the flames that aspire and glow     From heart and spirit and soul may climb     And triumph; higher than the souls lie low     Whose hearing hears not the livelong rhyme,     Whose eyesight sees not the light sublime,     That shines, that sounds, that ascends and lives     Unquenched of change, unobscured of time.     A long life's length, as a man's life gives     Space for the spirit that soars and strives     To strive and soar, has the soul shone through     That heeds not whither the world's wind drives     Now that the days and the ways it knew     Are strange, are dead as the dawn's grey dew     At high midnoon of the mounting day     That mocks the might of the dawn it slew.     Yet haply may not, and haply may,     No sense abide of the dead sun's ray     Wherein the soul that outsoars us now     Rejoiced with ours in its radiant sway.     Hope may hover, and doubt may bow,     Dreaming. Haply, they dream not how,     Not life but death may indeed be dead     When silence darkens the dead man's brow.     Hope, whose name is remembrance, fed     With love that lightens from seasons fled,     Dreams, and craves not indeed to know,     That death and life are as souls that wed.     But change that falls on the heart like snow     Can chill not memory nor hope, that show     The soul, the spirit, the heart and head,     Alive above us who strive below.