Classic Poem

Now is a great and shining company,
Choired like stars before the break of day,
So radiant, their silence is like singing,
Like mist of music down the Milky Way;
And they who wake, hearing the dawn wind bringing
Comfort of voices, are content and stay
A little while their tears, forbear the clinging
Of hands that hinder youth at last made free.
There is no death, nor change, nor any ending,
Only a journey, and so many go,
That we who stay at length discern the blending
Of the two roads, two breaths, two lives, and so
Come to the high and quiet knowledge that the dead
Are but ourselves made beautiful instead.

And you, O best beloved of them all,
How is it with you? It is well indeed?
Or is there in the vivid quiet need
Of some familiar task; yet does the call
Of the warm earth, the rise and fall
Of accents you held dear, when in the night
They talk of you, trouble the wingèd light?
O foolish question wisdom should forestall!
Now are you most immediate: so near,
That there is left no thing between us; no,
Nor veil of life. Ah dear, my very dear,
Only the dead are close and never apart,
Speaking in lucid sentences, and so,
Can find their way unhampered to a heart.

There is a wind that blows from earth when dusk is coming
Laden with richness of the stored up day;
The secret warmth of hidden paths; the humming
Of pollened bees; the sweetness of damp hay;
And mist along a shining valley stream;
And green cool reaches where the bending trees,
After the hot noon, listen for the breeze:
All this, I know, is part of your new dream.
And when I wake, and death seems most unfair,
Even then is some new mystery on the air,
Of scent, or sound, or loveliness of hue,
Stirring my heart and making me aware
I cannot grasp the rapture now of you,
Who were so close to dawn, and trees, and dew.