Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, AMARANTHUS, by CONDE BENOIST PALLEN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

AMARANTHUS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Sweet quiet of death, made quieter by the sound
Last Line: Robed by his hand in immortality.
Subject(s): Death; Graves; Mortality; Sleep; Soul; Dead, The; Tombs; Tombstones


Sweet quiet of death, made quieter by the sound
Of murmurous leaves above these quiet graves
Far from the angry city's fretful noise
Of loud mortality forgetting death.
Here let me rest and soothe the unquiet heart
With myrrh of meditation, where they sleep,
Who sleep in patient death. How still they sleep,
Arched with the giant limbs of sober oaks
Fretting the liquid roof of heaven's round
With tremulous tracery of trembling leaves just stirred
By reverent winds! Smooth slopes the silken sward
Soft o'er the silent host, like hope's green mantle
In promise of the miracle to come,
When at the great archangel's jubilant note
The battlements of death shall crumble shaken down,
As those proud turrets tottering tumbled flat
Before the blasts of marching Israel.
Sweet comfort of the mourning soul, that death
Holds not all life within its hoary palm,
Nor hollow eyes of sightless mockery
The final image of the days that looked
Upon a living world through lucent windows,
And saw life smile again through other eyes
That love enkindled into purer light,
The dawning promise of a deathless day.

II

Here greatness finds its kindred clod, and fame
A common clay mingling with lowlier names
Levelled by blasts of death to nothingness;
Here the vain lips of praise find voiceless echoes
In hollow chambers sounding silence back,
The phantom cries of images of dust;
And though the shouting universe should roll
The long reverberations of its voice
Through all the shaking avenues of time,
And the wide spaces of the firmament
Tremble with all their stars to that loud cry,
Death makes no answer from his dusty sleep.

How quiet thy rest, unheedful of the fret
Of time, the fiery fuming of the day,
The feverish fancy of the restless night
Eager for morn, and morn pursuing eve
In hope expectant of the happier hour
That never lights except to wing away
Again;—how quiet their changeless sleep, and free
From time's illusive speed outstripping time
As one that runs to overtake his shadow.

Here life lays down its fardel with a smile,
Disrobes the chafing garments that it wore
Through all the noisy masquerade, and sleeps
Dreamless that sleep as deep as silence is,
And everlasting as the voiceless hills
That time has builded to the end of time.
Sweet music to the ear of meditation,
The mute melodious voice of sleep murmuring
Lethean solace to the harried soul,
As plash of waters to the famished ear
Of one athirst midst white Sahara's sands:
Sweet sleep that kisses out the wrinkled cares,
And breathes the roses' crumpled petals smooth,
Thy cool white hand upon my forehead lay,
As does a mother on her child's flushed brow,
Till I, too, rest in dreamless vacancy.

III

And wouldst thou be content, O soul, to lie
In that deep emptiness, the wide abyss
Of death, grim depth unsoundable and void,
Where time embouches, and mortality,
Like some swift river in the salt sea's waste,
Pours all the gathered fulness of its course—
Content to lie and know not, lost to use
Of all the spirit's powers, and swayed
A weed along the slowly creeping wave
Of Lethe undulating heavily?

To rest were blesses, but to stagnate, woe:
The wearied soul craves life not death, new life,
The glad refreshment of the wasted powers
To rise again in recreated bloom,
As lift the shrivelled stalks in long parched fields
Under the moistening kisses of the rain,
Abundant gladness from benignant clouds.

But when I speak to Nature of this hope,
Heedless her ear and dumb her stony lips,
Like that huge image in Egyptian sands
With lidless eye in leaden speechlessness
Staring the crowding centuries hastening by,
As time were nothing and death the all of life:
Nor all the framework of this universal dust
Puts forth one little blossom of the hope
Of that large other life beyond death's touch;
From dust to dust again the barren cry
Sobbing through all the empty wastes of time,
While saddened Nature moans through all her days
As life pours back its bloom to nothingness.

Not there the answer, not there the golden gleam
Of promise kindling to the dawn of hope
Ushering the fulness of the day the soul
Awaits; but turning to the east I watch
With Pilate's soldiers for the coming light.

IV

About steep Sion's walls silence and sleep,
Twin sentinels, keep ghostly watch and tell
The sliding hours through all the heavy night,
While Death makes lament on the icy hills,
And mourning bends his hooded head and moans
Presaging vanquishment, the mighty lord
Of earth and man, since closed the clanging gates
On guilty Adam and his weeping spouse.

Now all the heavens stoop unto the west,
Tremble the expectant stars with paling fires,
And from the awakening east the soughing winds
Like distant melodies come faintly up
The vaulted darkness of the wasting night,
And through the half-drawn portals of the dawn
Voices of jubilation seem to sound
As from a shouting multitude far off.

V

Lo! Death lies prostrate in his kindred dust,
And Pilate's soldiers by a vacant tomb!
And Nature sings, for day is here, and bursts
Her melody from blossomed branch and floods
The enamelled verdure of the radiant field,
Pouring its amorous gladness on the air
In all the thousand glories of its flowers!
And shines the city in the golden flood
Of morning, and golden all the encircling hills;
And on Golgotha's brow the naked Cross
Glows golden with the light of new-born day.

For he hath risen, Lord and King of Death!
For he hath risen, Lord and King of Life!
Rejoice, my soul, and fear not Death, who died
That day and fell before my Lord and King
Forever; rejoice, and fear not; Death is dead,
And everlasting Life, eternal rose,
Unfolds immortal petals blown by Love
To perfect fulness in perpetual light!

VI

In him they sleep, who rest so quietly here,
In him to rise who sleep in patience here,
Far from the angry city's fretful noise
Of loud mortality forgetting death:
They sleep in his great peace, the halcyon calm
Of that deep peace the world can never give.
Blessèd their sleep in Him, who slept as they
To rise again, as they in Him shall rise
To sleep no more: here let me sleep in Him,
And slipping off the weeds of time rise up
Robed by His hand in immortality.





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