Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE SCULPTURED CHILDREN; ON CHANTREY'S MONUMENT IN LICHFIELD CATHEDRAL, by FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE SCULPTURED CHILDREN; ON CHANTREY'S MONUMENT IN LICHFIELD CATHEDRAL, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Fair images of sleep
Last Line: The faith, trust, joy, of immortality!
Alternate Author Name(s): Browne, Felicia Dorothea
Subject(s): Death - Children; Monuments; Sculpture & Sculptors; Death - Babies


FAIR images of sleep,
Hallowed, and soft, and deep,
On whose calm lids the dreamy quiet lies,
Like moonlight on shut bells
Of flowers in mossy dells,
Filled with the hush of night and summer skies!

How many hearts have felt
Your silent beauty melt
Their strength to gushing tenderness away!
How many sudden tears,
From depths of buried years
All freshly bursting, having confessed your sway!

How many eyes will shed
Still, o'er your marble bed,
Such drops from memory's troubled fountains wrung --
While hope hath blights to bear,
While love breathes mortal air,
While roses perish ere to glory sprung!

Yet from a voiceless home,
If some sad mother come
Fondly to linger o'er your lovely rest,
As o'er the cheek's warm glow,
And the sweet breathings low,
Of babes that grew and faded on her breast;

If then the dove-like tone
Of those faint murmurs gone,
O'er her sick sense too piercingly return;
If for the soft bright hair,
And brow and bosom fair,
And life, now dust, her soul too deeply yearn;

O gentle forms, entwined
Like tendrils, which the wind
May wave, so clasped, but never can unlink!
Send from your calm profound
A still, small voice -- a sound
Of hope, forbidding that lone heart to sink!

By all the pure, meek mind
In your pale beauty shrined,
By childhood's love -- too bright a bloom to die --
O'er her worn spirit shed,
O fairest, holiest dead!
The faith, trust, joy, of immortality!





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