Classic Poem

Come from the window, Mary, He has gone,
The night is here, and I would tell my tale
Of wondrous sights I saw among the dead,
And music sweeter than the minstrel song,
Of creatures fairer than the noonday sun,
And land where sorrow fades as in a dream.
For I was stretched upon a slab of stone
And laid by thee within a vault of rock,
I never saw thy robes of sombre ash
For I had gone upon the pilgrimage
Of Death, the last long pilgrimage called death.
It was a journey o'er the Milky Way,
Far past the golden stars that shine at night,
And o'er a mystic stream, whose waters black
Lay slumb'ring in a realm of sunless day,
I glided as a dove who bears sweet words
To some coy maiden by the Galilee,
Until I stood a thousand thousand leagues,
Above the crimson-tinted clouds that drift
As Cleopatra's barge a-down the Nile,
And there I saw a youth unlike the men of earth,

All clothed in robes as flimsy as the gauze
That separates the day from eventide.
Whose eye was like the nodding violet
When April weeps upon a grassy slope;
Whose voice came ever soft and low and sweet
As when the wind sings me a plaintive song.
" Good Lazarus, I am that Israfel
Who makes the realm of paradise to ring
With melody so wild and clear, the night
And all the stars that light the universe
Glide forth to hear the music of my lute.
To thee I come from Him whose majesty
The thunder and the waterfall have caught
To shew thee all the sights that men may see
When earthly life has run its merry course;
For thou art he who dreamed sweet dreams
Beside the Galilee while others toiled
Athwart the wheel or in the field of corn.
And worthy shalt thou be of Israfel,
And worthy Israfel of thee, my friend. "
Thus spake the man of wondrous countenance
And took me by the hand and led me on
To where the gates of gold like Pyrrhan plate
Shine in the splendour of the mystic light;
I heard a chord so grand the thunderstorm
Whose music wakes the slumb'ring souls of men
To it was like the faintest ecstasy,
" My choir is chanting praise to God the King, "
Said Israfel, and thus the angels sang: —