Classic Poem

When death draws down the blinds in this old house
And drapes a cobweb through the ante-room,
He will laugh softly, while thunderous mice carouse
In these bare halls where shadows mutter gloom;
Then old men, passing, will consult the stars:
" Some casual beauty effaced his calendars."

When an old time is over and a dawn
Of less inveterate faces meets the earth,
The young ones will stop a moment at the lawn
Of a withered house, before the incontinent birth
Of common flowers that nowise different seem —
That yearly shall take their sweet and golden dream.

Then one will say, " He is not dead, maybe,
Who was mortality"s unshaken lover
Who loved the spring upon the Tennessee,
The hushed fall and, again, the coming clover."
None will recall, not knowing, the twisted roads
Where the mind wanders till the heart corrodes.

Shall more than this flout the slow botch of time —
Of how he loved high laughter and the lonely
Heart, and cursed a dissipated rime
Of weariness in a golden morning, only
To rouse a cold Helen where the dawn distils
Her bewildered beauty on feet-forgotten hills.

Death will bow down the staircase and go out,
Leaving perhaps an unenvisaged hint
Of a young man who, in a stormy drought,
Rebuilt these fields in a slender Septuagint,
Translating an uncollected interest
Of the sun buried in a winter"s West.