Classic Poem

It happed at the time of Hallowmass, when the dead may walk abroad,
That the wraith of Ralph of the Peaceful Heart went forth from the courts of God,
Went forth from the paradisal ways, from the paths of asphodel,
From the vistas veiled in a golden haze where the souls of the sainted dwell;
And as he passed he heard the peal of the summoning trumpet blown,
And he saw the cloud of witnesses go wavering by to the throne;
And earthward swift on a tide of joy and love he seemed to swim,
For he thought of the hour when his stalwart sons should go to the throne with him;
When they should stand on his either hand who had been his pride on earth,
And know in the sight of the Living Light the bliss of a second birth.

And so to the land he had called his own, to the realm he had ruled, he came,
Where, under the spell of his gracious sway, grim war had been but a name,
Where the herds had strayed on the happy hills, and traffic roared in the mart,
Where life had lost its cankering ills, for peace had flowered in the heart.
But lo, as he looked on the harvest fields, on the ways of the wide-wheeled wain,
He saw wild masses of marching men sweep over the pillaged plain!
He saw no flocks on the great green slopes, no kine in barn or byre,
But the sheltering thatch of the farmstead roof licked up by the tongues of fire;
And the women's groans and the children's moans surged by him like a wave,
And the cloudy reek of plundered towns where none was left to save.

Then on he pressed to the seat of power in the crook of a broad sea-bay,
Where, under the frown of the bastioned walls, the lines of a leaguer lay;
In he went to the tallest tent, and sat unseen at the board,
Where the fierce chiefs plotted the city's sack, each chief with his barèd sword;
He who sat at the council's head was the leaguer's grimmest one,
And the dead king looked in his fiery eyes, and knew the man for his son.

So forth he went from the tallest tent, by the leaguer's outmost guard,
Till he came to the moat and the mighty keep and the archway triple-barred;
Not a warder's eye, as he slipped by, beheld the wraith of the king,
And scarce, as he sped toward the castle gate, did he meet with a living thing,
For Famine into the weedy streets had come as a grisly guest,
And down from the pallid window-panes there peered the face of the Pest.
He glided into the castle court, and on to the banquet-hall,
Wherefrom there echoed a mirthful rouse in iterant rise and fall;
He looked within for a little space, then shrank him back from the door,
For he saw the face of his other son, and a painted paramour.

It happed at the time of Hallowmass, when the dead may walk abroad,
That the wraith of Ralph of the Peaceful Heart went back to the courts of God;
And a bitterer anguish than was his few noble souls have known
As he saw the cloud of witnesses go wavering down from the throne.

He passed to the high and holy place, and straight to the feet of Him
About whom stand, in a shining band, the saints and the seraphim;
“I pray,” he said, “that my soul may tread the dark of the outer way,
That those I love may be borne above to the light of the Living Day;
Send Thou my soul to the utmost goal of night to dwell therein
That they thereby may be raised on high from the awful pits of sin!”

But the Presence spake. “Remorse shall wake because of these words of thine
Within the breasts of the recreant ones ere another day decline;
And they shall win from the ways of sin, ere the span of their lives be through,
Because of the love of a father's heart, and the deed that thou wouldst do!”
And so from the time of Hallowmass, when the dead may walk abroad,
The soul of Ralph of the Peaceful Heart abode in the courts of God.