'Farewell! We lose ourselves in light.'9
48
If these brief lays, of Sorrow born,
Were taken to be such as closed
5. The ancient yew tree in the graveyard was 8. Outer edges or fringes. described in section 2 as never changing. Now the 9. These lines express the hope that, as Tennyson poet discovers that in the flowering season, if the wrote, 'individuality lasts after death, and we are tree is struck ('my random stroke'), it gives off a not utterly absorbed into the Godhead. If we are cloud of golden pollen. to be finally merged into the Universal Soul, Love 6. Only the tips of the yew branches are in flower. asks to have at least one more parting before we 7. I.e., go through the customary circuit of life. lose ourselves.'
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IN MEMORIAM, EPILOGUE 1157
/
Grave doubts and answers here proposed,
Then these were such as men might scorn. 5 Her? care is not to part and prove; Sorrow's
She takes, when harsher moods remit,
What slender shade of doubt may flit,
And makes it vassal unto love; And hence, indeed, she sports with words,
10 But better serves a wholesome law,
And holds it sin and shame to draw
The deepest measure from the chords; Nor dare she trust a larger lay,? song
But rather loosens from the lip
15 Short swallow-flights of song, that dip
Their wings in tears, and skim away.
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Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of being slow. 5 Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is racked with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame. Be near me when my faith is dry,
IO And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
And weave their petty cells and die. Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
i 5 And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.
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O, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;
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1 138 / ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
5 That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete; That not a worm is cloven in vain;
10 That not a moth with vain desire
