Classic Poem

I

Shrunken by life to a hard grin,
Alone upon an unkempt bed,
The man whose labouring years had been
A watch with death himself lay dead.

His eyes stared at the ceiling; the chin
Had fallen; one sleeveless arm was thrown
Limply across the bed, the skin
Pulled thin to fit each finger bone.

Though all men knew that he was dead
No waxlight burned beside his bed.

And no one from the village came
With black boards for a coffin frame.

No housewife came to bind his mouth
With a smooth strip of linen cloth.
No prayer was said, and no one swung
The bell rope where the church bell hung.

II

Year after year the villagers had watched
The gutters lose their evening stains,
The skies descend and the grey dusk
Hang cobwebs on the windowpanes,
And by a yellowing street lamp seen
A hurrying coat of blistered green
Clutched by one hand, meagre and blotched
With colourless spots like a bad husk,
A shabby hat crushed low as if
To mask the eye they had not seen —
And pressed upon the sill and said:
" So the old buzzard's got a whiff,
He'll soon be pecking at the dead. "
And some of them there were that leaned
Hard on the windowpanes and turned
Sallow as though he were the fiend
And they were souls which he had earned.
None knew how long since he began —
How many nights since first he held
A dripping candle to lidless eyes
And peering let the hot wax fall
On lips composed for burial.
None knew how long since he began
To probe the dust heaps of the spirit
And finger dusty histories;
But slowly this washer of the dead discerned
What droll, half-earnest clowns inherit
The mask and tragic role of man.
Not even the child who heard his tread
Scuffling the autumn leaves and rain
Could guess what unpersuadable pities
Drove him forth to walk the rain,
Or how this lonely washer of the dead
Was by his own deep passion comforted,
Until he had grown old as ancient cities
That have looked so many times upon their slain.

Keeping no thought of slackened blood,
Less vigorous bone or tardy mind,
He watched a vain and dwarfish brood
Chatter at tasks which chance assigned,
Seeking in toil what poets scarcely find
Among the shadows of the immortal wood.
And always at the one moment when
His despised craft had power on men
He sought with patient pitiless care,
With visible wit, to make aware
What puffed, unprofitable things had borne
His bitter and compassionate scorn.

With starved horse and bare hearse he gave
The poor in spirit to the grave;
And nailed the comfortably good
In coffins of worm-eaten wood;
He showed the niggardly and mean
By hiding under ropes of green,
Small gaudy flowers and bits of vine
Their yellow coffins of cheap pine.
With hearse and hack on polished hack,
Tacky with trappings of crimped black,
He set the opulent and loud
Before the dumb, lip-fallen crowd.
But those who'd looked in bewilderment on
The unintelligible sun,
Who might have leapt with a cry and bled
Their youth out on a barricade;
All those whose frustrate hearts had cried
For braver beauty, and so died,
Crumpled and dry, broken like a clod
Too many heels have trod —
To these a slow processional
Was given — a silver drooping pall,
Falling in sheeny folds which shifted
Stiffly as violent horses lifted
Black crests of thick plumes and drew
The dim pomp to the grave.

But few
He found among his kith and neighbours
Who earned such honour of his labours:
Some nine there were and of these five
He'd known but slightly when alive.

So he had lived, tormented, proud
As a poet, hated by the crowd
That paunched and bred and plied a trade,
Kept small accounts and sometimes prayed
To an old god with untrimmed beard
Who kept accounts and slily peered
Into the things too slily done;
Who made the moon and trimmed the sun.
And all these when they heard him dead,
Shrugged their bones and sniffed and said,
" Good riddance to the village, then;
He was a pest to honest men. "

So now he lay, a poor, untended
Wrack of shrunk skin and jointless bone,
The man whose endless task was ended,
Whose anguish stifled like a groan.

All day a small insistent clock
Ticked and slid to the hours' mark
And rattling to a rusty shock
Hour by hour brought on the dark.

And with the dark a rat came out
And snuffed among stale bacon rinds
And chunks of bread; a leaking spout
Trickled; a gust flopped in the blinds.

And in the dark the dead man sprawled
Like one who'd stretched a bloody reign
And in his violent hour had called
Upon the household guards in vain.

III

The night is thin. The air is crisp,
For the spring is scarcely felt at night.
The air is still with a windy lisp
Where the first leaves in the thicket are.
The moon is misty as a star,
But the rounded stones are washed with white
And a chance spade glints with steely light.

There is no sound at the graveyard's edge
Save for the rustling hornbeam hedge;
But something shivers beneath the soil
As when a mole is at his toil;
Something struggles under the ground,
Thrusts the earth to a gritty mound,
Squirms and flutters, and suddenly there
Is a frail wisp upon the air,
Like the blue smoke of sodden leaves
Which children burn on autumn eves;
It writhes and gathers, shifts and breaks,
Thickens with colour, waves and takes
The semblance of a man long buried,
Old before death, his gaunt cheeks serried
With furrows where the rain has lain.
Another mound of grave-loam stirred;
A second gathered shape; a third,
Then five dead men, and one dead woman,
Cracking the ground at an unheard summon,
Out of the shapeless air unravel.
They glide without feet along the gravel
Between black borders of clipped box,
Brush through the wicket's spikes and locks,
Glide to the church, where no one tolls
Except for pay for dead men's souls;
Past the church and through the streets
Where smug wives snore between clean sheets
With every window shut and barred
And a restless watchdog in the yard.
Then at a word no lip had uttered
Into the dead man's house they fluttered
And there for a waiting moment stood
Like panting things of bone and blood,
And stared at the blind shape which there
Cluttered the green distorted square
The late moon in the window made.

For these of all whom he had laid
In the obscure and level earth,
These only he had thought of worth.
These alone had sought to enmesh
Ecstasy in the unholding flesh,
Or with stretched throats had stood
While drums and scarlet in the blood
Arrayed a triumph for the mind,
When raggedness or cold assigned
Their aching arms to swinging slops
To pigs or storing a farmer's crops;
And waking to the white rain
Pecking at the shingle roof had lain
Alone and awake, while with young breath
Through love of life they cried for death.
And these now from the grave were come,
In dumb and yearning shapes were come
To bear the dead man to his grave.
Four abrupt white tapers wave
At the four corners of the bed.
A sudden spectral gesture moulds
The hands to quiet, the feet to stone;
And circling shadows compose the dead
On a low bier of forgotten boards;
The moonlight through the bleared panes sifted
Falls on a pall of rigid folds
And tassels threaded with tarnished cords.
Then with a light of tapers lifted,
Shuffling as if to a monotone,
Out of the room, the narrow door —
Nodding beneath the lintel's beam —
The dumb, black-leaning phantoms bore
Their burden; and, as if seen through a stream,
Went wavering over the pavement stones,
Rocking as if their shoulders shook
Under the confused weight of bones.
No shutter's chink widened to look
With a quickened eye where in the drowned
Colour and glimmer of thin moonshine
The corpse-bearers shuddered without sound.
No window gaped for the watchdog's whine
As with its load the processional
Flickered by silent door and wall,
House by house, to the street's verge,
Where from a shadow against a light
It dwindled to shadow and merged
Into the phantasmal night.