Classic Poem

AT THE GRAVE OF CHARLES WOLFE

Where the graves were many, we looked for one.
 Oh, the Irish rose was red,
And the dark stones saddened the setting sun
 With the names of the early dead.
Then, a child who, somehow, had heard of him
 In the land we love so well,
Kept lifting the grass till the dew was dim
 In the churchyard of Clonmel.

But the sexton came. “Can you tell us where
 Charles Wolfe is buried?” “I can.
—See, that is his grave in the corner there.
 (Ay, he was a clever man,
If God had spared him!) It 's many that come
 To be asking for him,” said he.
But the boy kept whispering, “Not a drum
 Was heard,”—in the dusk to me.

(Then the gray man tore a vine from the wall
 Of the roofless church where he lay,
And the leaves that the withering year let fall
 He swept, with the ivy, away;
And, as we read on the rock the words
 That, writ in the moss, we found,
Right over his bosom a shower of birds
 In music fell to the ground.)

. . . Young poet, I wonder did you care,
 Did it move you in your rest
To hear that child in his golden hair,
 From the mighty woods of the West,
Repeating your verse of his own sweet will,
 To the sound of the twilight bell,
Years after your beating heart was still
 In the churchyard of Clonmel?