Classic Poem

The grass grew green between us, and I said
There is no soul to love me—peace is lost;
Over my heavy heart my hands I crossed,
And mourned the sun away: “She is not dead

But sleepeth only; time is as a wall
Where death makes rents, and thro' which come and go
Hourly, the spirits which ye mourn for so,
Faithless, and faint, and blind.” As if a call

Came out of heaven, I lifted up my eyes,
And thought to see white wings along the air;
The many stars, the single moon, were there—
Seeing not, I felt, the might that deifies.

The darkness had the quality of light;
I knew no soul that God had made could die—
That time is knitted to eternity,
And finite drawn into the Infinite.

The violets of seven bright times of bloom
Lay purple in the moonlight as before,
But I, who came a mourner, mourned no more;
An angel had been sitting at the tomb—

The stone was rolled away. A temple gate,
O'errun with flowers, and shining with the light
Of altar-fires, life seemed to me that night,
Where, for the marriage crowning, lovers wait.