Here, where sharp the sea-bird shrills his ditty
Flickering flame-wise through the clear live calm,
Rose
triumphal, crowning all a city,
Roofs exalted once with
prayer and psalm,
Built of holy hands for holy pity,
Frank and fruitful as a sheltering palm.
Church and
hospice wrought in faultless fashion,
Hall and chancel
bounteous and sublime,
Wide and sweet and glorious as
compassion,
Filled and thrilled with force of choral
chime,
Filled with spirit of prayer and thrilled with
passion.
Hailed a God more merciful than Time.
Ah, less mighty, less than Time prevailing,
Shrunk,
expelled, made nothing at his nod,
Less than clouds
across the sea-line sailing,
Lies he, stricken by his
master's rod.
"Where is man?" the cloister murmurs
wailing;
Back the mute shrine thunders - "Where is God?"
Here is all the end of all his glory -
Dust, and grass,
and barren silent stones.
Dead, like him, one hollow
tower and hoary
Naked in the sea-wind stands and
moans,
Filled and thrilled with its perpetual story:
Here, where earth is dense with dead men's bones.
Low and
loud and long, a voice for ever,
Sounds the wind's clear
story like a song.
Tomb from tomb the waves devouring
sever,
Dust from dust as years relapse along;
Graves
where nen made sure to rest, and never
Lie dismantled by
the season's wrong.
Now displaced, devoured and
descrated,
Now by Time's hands darkly disinterred,
Those poor dead that sleeping here awaited
Long the
archangel's re-creating word,
Closed about with roofs and
walls high-gated
Till the blast of judgment should be
heard,
Naked, shamed, cast out of consecration,
Corpe and coffin, yea the very graves,
Scoffed at,
scattered, shaken from their station,
Spurned and
scourged of wind and sea like slaves,
Desolate beyond
man's desolation,
Shrink and sink into the waste of
waves.
Tombs, with bare white piteous bones protruded,
Shroudless, down the loose collapsing banks,
Crumble,
from their constant place detruded,
That the sea devours
and gives not thanks.
Graves where hope and prayer
and sorrow brooded
Gape and slide and perish, ranks on
ranks.
Rows on rows and line by line through to be.
Scarce a stone wheron a child might stumble
Breaks
the grim field paced alone of me.
Earth, nd man,
and all their gods wax humble
Here, where Time brings
pasture to the sea.
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