And up the stream of days he seem’d to float,
And twice seven years was toiling for his wife:
And all his thought lay heaving like a boat
On the long swell of life.
How statue-like that shape in shadows deep-
Like one of marble in the minster’s rest,
With a pale babe-not dead, but gone to sleep
For ever on her breast.
And the white mother’s breast may seem to heave,
And the white babe to feel about her face;
‘Tis but our restless hearts that thus deceive
The quiet of the place.
And Rachel look’d upon her Israel,-wann’d
Like a white flower with the summer rain,
So she with sweat of child-birth,-her thin hand
Laid in his hand again.
Near Ephrath there’s a pillar’d tomb apart;
It throws a shadow on her where she lies-
And she, a shadow on her husband’s heart,
Of household memories.
So slowly upward did the cold death creep
From foot to face with its strange lines of white,
Like foam-streaks on a river dark and deep,
Lash’d by the winds all night.
By the rough brook of life no more he wrestles,
Huddling its hoarse waves until night depart;
No more the pale face of a Rachel nestles
Upon his broken heart.
Hush’d is the song, the tribesmen all are bless’d,
According to his blessing, every one;
But still the old man’s spirit may not rest
Until he charge each son-
Not where the Pharaohs lie, with incense breathed
Round awful galleries, grim with shapes of wrath,
Hawk-headed, vulture-pinioned, serpent-wreathed,
Hued like an Indian moth-
But lay him where from forest or green slope
To Mamre’s cave the low wind breatheth balm,
Chanteth a litany of immortal hope,
Singeth a funeral psalm.
Like a tall ship that beareth slow and proud
A fallen chief, for pall and plume in motion,
The death-dark topmast and the death-like shroud
Pass o’er the quiet ocean.
Silent the helmsman stands beside the wheel,
Silent the mariners in their watches wait,
And a great music rolls before the keel
As through an abbey gate:
Like that tall ship, a grand procession comes
Up from old Father Nile to Hebron’s hill;
But no dead march is beat upon the drums,
And every trump is still.
Heartsore, and footsore with the march of life-
Soldier of God, whose fields were foughten well,
Resteth him from the cumbrance and the strife
World-wearied Israel.
Still it sails onward, where the Red Sea fills
With snowy drift of shells his coral bowers,
On through the wondrous land of rose-red hills
To that of rose-red flowers:
The land where aye, through many a purple gap,
The wanderer sees a mountain wall upspring,
And ever in his ear the wild waves flap
Like a great eagle’s wing.
Ever I walk with that funereal train-
The stars shine over it for tapers tall,
And Jordan’s music is the requiem strain
Drawn out from fall to fall.
Come, O thou south wind! with thy fragrance faint,
Bring from those folded forests on thy breath
Balm for the mummy, lying like a saint
Upon his car of death.
Bear him, ye bearers! lay him down at last
In still Machpelah, down by Leah’s side-
On that pale bridegroom shimmering light is cast,Laid by that awful bride.
(Archbishop William Alexander)
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Based on Topics: God Poems, Life Poems, Night Poems, Light Poems, Death & Dying Poems, Faces Poems, Place Poems, Flowers Poems, Hope Poems, Sons Poems, Summer PoemsBased on Keywords: beareth, bearers, death-like, huddling, topmast, hued, litany, wrestles, pharaohs, footsore, foughten