On A Friend Recently Dead

    I

    The stream goes fast.
    When this that is the present is the past,
    'Twill be as all the other pasts have been,
    A failing hill, a daily dimming scene,
    A far strange port with foreign life astir
    The ship has left behind, the voyager
    Will never return to; no, nor see again,
    Though with a heart full of longing he may strain
    Back to project himself, and once more count
    The boats, the whitened walls that climbed the mount,
    Mark the cathedral's roof, the gathered spires,
    The vanes, the windows red with sunset's fires,
    The gap of the market-place, and watch again
    The coloured groups of women, and the men
    Lounging at ease along the low stone wall
    That fringed the harbour; and there beyond it all
    High pastures morning and evening scattered with small
    Specks that were grazing sheep....    It is all gone,
    It is all blurred that once so brightly shone;
    He cannot now with the old clearness see
    The rust upon one ringbolt of the quay.


    II

    And yesterday is dead, and you are dead.
    Your duplicate that hovered in my head
    Thins like blown wreathing smoke, your features grow
    To interrupted outlines, and all will go
    Unless I fight dispersal with my will...
    So I shall do it ... but too conscious still
    That, when we walked together, had I known
    How soon your journey was to end alone,
    I should not, now that you have gone from view,
    Be gathering derelict odds and ends of you;
    But in the intense lucidity of pain
    Your likeness would have burnt into my brain.
    I did not know; lovable and unique,
    As volatile as a bubble and as weak,
    You sat with me, and my eyes registered
    This thing and that, and sluggishly I heard
    Your voice, remembering here and there a word.


    III

    So in my mind there's not much left of you,
    And that disintegrates; but while a few
    Patches of memory's mirror still are bright
    Nor your reflected image there has quite
    Faded and slipped away, it will be well
    To search for each surviving syllable
    Of voice and body and soul.    And some I'll find
    Right to my hand, and some tangled and blind
    Among the obscure weeds that fill the mind.
    A pause....
    I plunge my thought's hooked resolute claws
    Deep in the turbid past.    Like drowned things in the jaws
    Of grappling-irons, your features to the verge
    Of conscious knowledge one by one emerge.
    Can I not make these scattered things unite? ...
    I knit my brows and clench my eyelids tight
    And focus to a point....    Streams of dark pinkish light
    Convolve; and now spasmodically there flit
    Clear pictures of you as you used to sit:,
    The way you crossed your legs stretched in your chair,
    Elbow at rest and tumbler in the air,
    Jesting on books and politics and worse,
    And still good company when most perverse.
    Capricious friend!
    Here in this room not long before the end,
    Here in this very room six months ago
    You poised your foot and joked and chuckled so.
    Beyond the window shook the ash-tree bough,
    You saw books, pictures, as I see them now,
    The sofa then was blue, the telephone
    Listened upon the desk, and softly shone
    Even as now the fire-irons in the grate,
    And the little brass pendulum swung, a seal of fate
    Stamping the minutes; and the curtains on window and door
    Just moved in the air; and on the dark boards of the floor
    These same discreetly-coloured rugs were lying...
    And then you never had a thought of dying.


    IV

    You are not here, and all the things in the room
    Watch me alone in the gradual growing gloom.
    The you that thought and felt are I know not where,
    The you that sat and drank in that arm-chair
        Will never sit there again.
        For months you have lain
        Under a graveyard's green
        In some place abroad where I've never been.
        Perhaps there is a stone over you,
        Or only the wood and the earth and the grass cover you.
    But it doesn't much matter; for dead and decayed you lie
    Like a million million others who felt they would never die,
    Like Alexander and Helen the beautiful,
    And the last collier hanged for murdering his trull;
    All done with and buried in an equal bed.


    V

    Yes, you are dead like all the other dead.
    You are not here, but I am here alone.
    And evening falls, fusing tree, water and stone
    Into a violet cloth, and the frail ash-tree hisses
    With a soft sharpness like a fall of mounded grain.
    And a steamer softly puffing along the river passes,
    Drawing a file of barges; and silence falls again.
    And a bell tones; and the evening darkens; and in sparse rank
    The greenish lights well out along the other bank.
    I have no force left now; the sights and sounds impinge
    Upon me unresisted, like raindrops on the mould.
    And, striving not against my melancholy mood,
    Limp as a door that hangs upon one failing hinge,
    Limp, with slack marrowless arms and thighs, I sit and brood
    On death and death and death.    And quiet, thin and cold,
    Following of this one friend the hopeless, helpless ghost,
    The weak appealing wraiths of notable men of old
    Who died, pass through the air; and then, host after host,
    Innumerable, overwhelming, without form,
    Rolling across the sky in awful silent storm,
    The myriads of the undifferentiated dead
    Whom none recorded, or of whom the record faded.
    O spectacle appallingly sublime!
    I see the universe one long disastrous strife,
    And in the staggering abysses of backward and forward time
    Death chasing hard upon the heels of creating life.
    And I, I see myself as one of a heap of stones
    Wetted a moment to life as the flying wave goes over,
    Onward and never returning, leaving no mark behind.
    There's nothing to hope for.    Blank cessation numbs my mind,
    And I feel my heart thumping gloomy against its cover,
    My heavy belly hanging from my bones.


    VI

        Below in the dark street
        There is a tap of feet,
        I rise and angrily meditate
        How often I have let of late
        This thought of death come over me.
        How often I will sit and backward trace
        The deathly history of the human race,
        The ripples of men who chattered and were still,
        Known and unknown, older and older, until
        Before man's birth I fall, shivering and aghast
        Through a hole in the bottom of the remotest past;
            Till painfully my spirit throws
            Her giddiness off; and then as soon
        As I recover and try to think again,
            Life seems like death; and all my body grows
        Icily cold, and all my brain
        Cold as the jagged craters of the moon....
        And I wonder is it not strange that I
        Who thus have heard eternity's black laugh
            And felt its freezing breath,
        Should sometimes shut it out from memory
        So as to play quite prettily with death,
            And turn an easy epitaph?

    I can hear a voice whispering in my brain:
    "Why this is the old futility again!
    Criminal! day by day
    Your own life is ebbing swiftly away.
    And what have you done with it,
    Except to become a maudlin hypocrite?"
        Yes, I know, I know;
    One should not think of death or the dead overmuch; but one's mind's made so
    That at certain times the roads of thought all lead to death,
    And false reasoning clouds one's soul as a window with breath
        Is clouded in winter's air,
        And all the faith one may have
    Lies useless and dead as a body in the grave.