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A DREAM OF RESURRECTION.
- SO heavenly beautiful it lay,
- It was less like a human corse
- Than that fair shape in which perforce
- A lost hope clothes itself alway.
- The dream showed very plain: the bed
- Where that known unknown face reposed,—
- A woman’s face with eyelids closed,
- A something precious that was dead;
- A something, lost on this side life,
- By which the mourner came and stood,
- And laid down, ne’er to be indued,
- All flaunting robes of earthly strife;
- Shred off, like votive locks of hair,
- Youth’s ornaments of pride and strength,
- And cast them in their golden length
- The silence of that bier to share.
- No tears fell,—but with gazings long
- Lorn memory tried to print that face
- On the heart’s ever‐vacant place,
- With a sun‐finger, sharp and strong.—
- Then kisses, dropping without sound,
- And solemn arms wound round the dead,
- And lifting from the natural bed
- Into the coffin’s strange new bound.
- Yet still no farewell, or belief
- In death, no more than one believes
- In some dread truth that sudden weaves
- The whole world in a shroud of grief.
- And still unanswered kisses; still
- Warm clingings to the image cold
- With an incredulous faith’s close fold,
- Creative in its fierce “I will.”
- Hush,—hush! the marble eyelids move,
- The kissed lips quiver into breath:
- Avaunt, thou mockery of Death!
- Avaunt!—we are conquerors, I and Love.
- Corpse of dead Hope, awake, arise,
- A living Hope that only slept
- Until the tears thus overwept
- Had washed the blindness from our eyes.
- Come back into the upper day:
- Pluck off these cerements. Patient shroud,
- We’ll wrap thee as a garment proud
- Round the fair shape we thought was clay.
- Clasp, arms; cling, soul; eyes, drink anew
- The beauty that returns with breath:
- Faith, that out‐loved this trance‐like death,
- May see this resurrection too.
