Ar the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall, o'erthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance, hath slain, and you whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space,
For, if above all these, my sins abound,
"Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace,
When we are there; here on this lowly ground
Teach me how to repent; for that 's as good
As if thou hadst sealed my pardon with thy blood.
POOR soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
Fooled by these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend ?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there's no more dying then.
W. SHAKESPEARE.
DEATH, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so:
For those, whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow, Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow;
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones and souls' delivery.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt
TO THE GENIUS OF ETERNAL SLUMBER
SLEEP, that art named eternal! Is there then
No chance of waking in thy noiseless realm ?
Come there no fretful dreams to overwhelm
The feverish spirits of o'erlaboured men?
Shall conscience sleep where thou art; and shall
pain
Lie folded with tired arms around her head;
And memory be stretched upon a bed
Of ease, whence she shall never rise again?
O sleep, that art eternal! Say, shall love
Breathe like an infant slumbering at thy breast? Shall hope there cease to throb; and shall the smart
Of things impossible at length find rest?
Thou answerest not. The poppy-heads above Thy calm brows sleep. How cold, how still thou art!
It is not death, that sometime in a sigh
This eloquent breath shall take its speechless flight;
That sometime these bright stars, that now reply
In sunlight to the sun, shall set in night,
That this warm conscious flesh shall perish quite,
And all life's ruddy springs forget to flow;
That thoughts shall cease, and the immortal spright
Be lapped in alien clay and laid below;
It is not death to know this,—but to know
That pious thoughts, which visit at new graves
In tender pilgrimage, will cease to go
So duly and so oft,-and when grass waves
Over the past-away, there may be then
No resurrection in the minds of men,
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