My own dim life should teach me this, That life shall live forevermore, Else earth is darkness at the core,
And dust and ashes all that is;
5
This round of green, this orb of flame, Fantastic beauty; such as lurks
7. Carried away from. heaven (cf. section 56, line 28). 'From orb to orb': 8. An image representing the boundary between the angelic spirit ('flame') of the dead moves from different worlds, especially that between Earth and star to star.
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IN MEMORIAM, EPILOGUE / 1155
In some wild poet, when he works Without a conscience or an aim.
What then were God to such as I? 10
'Twere hardly worth my while to choose Of things all mortal, or to use A little patience ere I die;
Twere best at once to sink to peace, Like birds the charming serpent9 draws, 15 To drop head-foremost in the jaws Of vacant darkness and to cease.
35
Yet if some voice that man could trust Should murmur from the narrow house, 'The cheeks drop in, the body bows; Man dies, nor is there hope in dust'; 5 Might I not say? 'Yet even here, But for one hour, O Love, I strive To keep so sweet a thing alive.' But I should turn mine ears and hear ioThe moanings of the homeless sea, The sound of streams that swift or slow Draw down Aeonian1 hills, and sow The dust of continents to be; 15And Love would answer with a sigh, 'The sound of that forgetful shore2 Will change my sweetness more and more, Half-dead to know that I shall die.' 20O me, what profits it to put An idle case? If Death were seen At first as Death, Love had not been, Or been in narrowest working shut, Mere fellowship of sluggish moods, Or in his coarsest Satyr-shape3 Had bruised the herb and crushed the grape, And basked and battened0 in the woods.4 grown fat $ $ *
9. Some snakes are reputed to capture their prey by hypnotizing it. 1. Eons old, seemingly everlasting. 2. I.e., of Lethe, the river in the classical underworld whose water caused forgetfulness. 3. In Greek mythology satyrs were half-man, half- beast (goat or horse) in appearance, desires, and behavior.
4. Lines 18-24 may be paraphrased: if we knew death to be final and that no afterlife were possible, love could not exist except on a primitive or bestial level.
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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
39
Old warder of these buried bones,
And answering now my random stroke
With fruitful cloud and living smoke,
Dark yew, that graspest at the stones 5 And dippest toward the dreamless head,
To thee too comes the golden hour
When flower is feeling after flower;5
But Sorrow?fixed upon the dead, And darkening the dark graves of men?
io What whispered from her lying lips?
Thy gloom is kindled at the tips,6
And passes into gloom again.
47
That each, who seems a separate whole,
Should move his rounds,7 and fusing all
The skirts8 of self again, should fall
Remerging in the general Soul, 5 Is faith as vague as all unsweet.
Eternal form shall still divide
The eternal soul from all beside;
And I shall know him when we meet;
And we shall sit at endless feast,
io Enjoying each the other's good.
What vaster dream can hit the mood
Of Love on earth? He seeks at least
Upon the last and sharpest height,
Before the spirits fade away,
15 Some landing place, to clasp and say,
