Classic Poem

Now do I know
How newly dead men go
As ragged ghosts among familiar ways,
Seeking to live again remembered days.

I see one stand,
Vale and Mount on either hand,
And saying, " Here I walked and walked with her;
Here was wheat, and hops here, and charlock there.

" Here was elder,
First-tinted berries of guelder.
Here, long before, wild apple flushed full pink.
Here broke that fire of violets, I think —

" Or was it — yes,
It was there they burned to death.
How all things burned that spring, and burned away,
As spring burned into summer, and then lay

" Glowing and prone,
With summer lovelier grown!
My heels with hers made rhyme upon the flint,
In music voice and silences were blent.

" And now, never,
Never, never, never, never,
Never again! " And turning away he aches,
And with old mortal sorrow his heart breaks;

Wishing he were
But one sad hour with her
On that salt road, with hill and vale and cloud,
Oast-houses, orchards, violets, skylarks loud.

O, now I know
How one new-dead must go,
How in his haunted shadow-brain for ever
Sounds the forsaken, " Never, never, never! "