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On A Friend Recently Dead
By John Collings Squire, Sir
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.
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