Classic Poem

There is no death.—The death-deep awful gloom
We see and dread
Is not the real invincible fog-fume
Round the death-bed.

There is no death, no darkness. All is light.
The deepest gloom
Is not the murk impenetrable night
Around the tomb.

There is a deeper darkness than the dark
Where no stars beam:
A blackness where not one most faint star-spark
Can ever gleam.

Wrong-doing is death, and this alone is death.
Death is senThere
That we may shiver at his ice-cold breath
And, shuddering, fear:

But fear not him, but his similitude—
The death more deep
Than ever mortal dreamed, the death more rude
Than deathlike sleep.

The death we, and we only, can create;
The death we bring
By fraud and selfishness and wrath and hate
And misdoing.

This is the eternal death. The other death
Is just a change,
A sudden dreamlike passage underneath
A process strange.

And all that gives it horror, steeps in gloom
Earth's golden springs,
Is but a symbol of the eternal doom
Wrong-doing brings.