Let the Dead Bury Their Dead

Luke ix. 60

Where marshes venom-steeped the life-breeze taint And fitful meteors lap the watery wild, A moon sinks in the cloud-mire, dazed and faint, Its pearly flush defiled, Halo’d in sallow vapours like a saint Through paths impure beguiled.

But worse the gloom within the castle walls Where moans the lord whom pestilence devours: The serfs awe-stricken flee his festering halls, The plague-star o’er him lowers, On his glazed eyes the fatal glimmer falls While night weighs down his towers.

A crescent moon whose advent stays the pest Embalms the dead with heavenly obsequies, But there are none to bear him to his rest, His body shroudless lies; Anointed not, by pious rites unblest, Unto the grave he cries.

A great half-moon now dominates the dome, With stern upbraidings yet not less benign: But the blank gazers to his final home The dead dare not consign, Lured on by sullen spectres of the gloam Who their own dead enshrine.

Again the drowsy marshes pillow night And darkness severs sky and earth in two, But with a rush of cloud dispersing might A full moon hurries through; The corpse is shrouded as in living light, The castle walls look new.

The heaven is one blue wave; it seems to break While lucid spray with dreamlight floods the air: The coffins in the quickened graveyards quake, The bones know they are there, And ghostly shades their buried depths forsake To gather in the glare.

As dusk descends, by its scared rays illumed, A soul-procession dense and denser grows: Hearse after hearse night-horsed and sable-plumed A mirage heavenward throws: The newly dead is by the dead entombed And nature has repose.