Poems (Spofford)/At an Old Grave

AT AN OLD GRAVE.

Ruth, daughter of Crisp and Mary Lee,
Lies here in the hope to rise again:
She was born in seventeen forty-eight,
And died in eighteen hundred and one.
The gift of grace to her was free,
She carried her light in the path of men,
And went from the twilight of this estate
Whither God himself is the light and sun.

Thus on the stone was the legend spelled,
When the yellow lichens were scraped away,
Though myriad touches of storm and shower
Had smoothed the wrinkled lettering out,
And the scutcheon the carven cherubs held
Had slowly faded day after day;
While, fresh as they bloomed in their earliest hour,
The wantoning vines crept all about.

And soon deciphered, it stood sole sign
For fifty-three long-forgotten years,
Lonely and childless and sad, perhaps,
Of outward grace and comfort shorn.
And the day with its wide, indifferent shine
It has learned to know, and the night's chill tears;
And round it the train's wild echo flaps
With screaming speed for the eager morn.

Beneath the seasons' heavy hand
The sunken slate leaned down the grave,
While Mays to Aprils have swiftly wheeled,
And slow Arcturus has reddened the snow;
And it sucked the gloom from the sky and land
To that spot where the scanty grasses wave,
Into the heart of its sombre shield,
Till the earth spread laughing and bright below.

For over the slope and far away,
Bathed in the beautiful light of day,
Dimpled with shadows of floating cloud,
And blue in the distant summer still,
The level fields of the champaign lay,
Golden and brown from new-mown hay;
And behind some lofty and lucid shroud
The slant sun rained on a lifted hill.

So when I saw it first, and so,
Had the burial mount refined to glass,
And Ruth forsaken her sleep to look,
She had seen the country lapped in June,
While the loud bee hummed in the clover blow,
And, far from the idle feet that pass,
Like the rustle of any limpid brook,
The throstle fluted his broken tune.

Did the skies let down upon Ruth's birthnight
Larger and lower their throbbing stars;
The river, brimming his banks, flow clear,
And low winds ripple a silken stir?
Did a meteor thrust its veils of light,
And kingly essences burst their bars,
All for the love of the new life here,
And the possibilities born with her?

And hour by hour did the skies grow pale,
The river go by to swell the tide,
And the spirits that wait on awful chance
Lift their plumes for a loftier flight?
Did the great heart falter, the great fate fail,
And the moment that had been glorified
Slip into the slow and idle dance
Of the hours that bring about the light?

Or a sad spark struck to flickering fire
Was that life, held close from the gladsome wind,
And set in all too narrow a niche,
Where rarely breath from the full south came,
Till the mounting spirit, fluttering higher,
Drew the fluent air expressed and thinned,
And wasting the odorous oils and rich,
It turned and fed on its sacred flame?

Ah, what matter? Her life she led
Seventy years and more ago;
Over her slumber the dew distils,
The wild bird warbles, the wild rose blooms,
As o'er any queen who lies crowned and dead!
It may be the innocent natures know
That as well God's purpose such life fulfils
As the lives that lead into lofty tombs.

For haply the simple life of Ruth,
Unthrilled by a lover's tender touch,
Unfilled by a mother's sweet content,
Fed with no honeyed joys at all,
Reached to the heart of things, in truth,
And moulded divine results as much
As the life to which an empire bent,
While it held the same brown dust in thrall!

The low cloud blushed and burned to see
The sun that over her hovered at last;
Soon would the dews shine all about,
And the great procession of stars would
As much for her still, I said, as for me,—
While I stayed till the sweet-breathed cattle passed.
Nor yet has her murmur quite died out
That whispers along my lingering rhyme!