On a Friend Recently Dead

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 astirThe ship has left behind, the voyagerWill never return to; no, nor see again,Though with a heart full of longing he may strainBack to project himself, and once more countThe 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 againThe coloured groups of women, and the menLounging at ease along the low stone wallThat fringed the harbour; and there beyond it allHigh pastures morning and evening scattered with smallSpecks that were grazing sheep.... It is all gone,It is all blurred that once so brightly shone;He cannot now with the old clearness seeThe rust upon one ringbolt of the quay.

And yesterday is dead, and you are dead.Your duplicate that hovered in my headThins like blown wreathing smoke, your features growTo interrupted outlines, and all will goUnless I fight dispersal with my will...So I shall do it ... but too conscious stillThat, when we walked together, had I knownHow 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 painYour 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 registeredThis thing and that, and sluggishly I heardYour voice, remembering here and there a word.

So in my mind there's not much left of you,And that disintegrates; but while a fewPatches of memory's mirror still are brightNor your reflected image there has quiteFaded and slipped away, it will be wellTo search for each surviving syllableOf voice and body and soul. And some I'll findRight to my hand, and some tangled and blindAmong the obscure weeds that fill the mind.A pause....I plunge my thought's hooked resolute clawsDeep in the turbid past. Like drowned things in the jawsOf grappling-irons, your features to the vergeOf conscious knowledge one by one emerge.Can I not make these scattered things unite? ...I knit my brows and clench my eyelids tightAnd focus to a point.... Streams of dark pinkish lightConvolve; and now spasmodically there flitClear 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 agoYou 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 telephoneListened upon the desk, and softly shoneEven as now the fire-irons in the grate,And the little brass pendulum swung, a seal of fateStamping the minutes; and the curtains on window and doorJust moved in the air; and on the dark boards of the floorThese same discreetly-coloured rugs were lying...And then you never had a thought of dying.

You are not here, and all the things in the roomWatch 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-chairWill never sit there again.For months you have lainUnder a graveyard's greenIn 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 lieLike 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.

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 stoneInto a violet cloth, and the frail ash-tree hissesWith 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 rankThe greenish lights well out along the other bank.I have no force left now; the sights and sounds impingeUpon 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 broodOn 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 oldWho 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 deadWhom 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 timeDeath chasing hard upon the heels of creating life.And I, I see myself as one of a heap of stonesWetted 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.

Below in the dark streetThere is a tap of feet,I rise and angrily meditateHow often I have let of lateThis thought of death come over me.How often I will sit and backward traceThe deathly history of the human race,The ripples of men who chattered and were still,Known and unknown, older and older, untilBefore man's birth I fall, shivering and aghastThrough a hole in the bottom of the remotest past;Till painfully my spirit throwsHer giddiness off; and then as soonAs I recover and try to think again,Life seems like death; and all my body growsIcily cold, and all my brainCold as the jagged craters of the moon....And I wonder is it not strange that IWho thus have heard eternity's black laughAnd felt its freezing breath,Should sometimes shut it out from memorySo 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 dayYour 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'smind's made soThat at certain times the roads of thought all lead to death,And false reasoning clouds one's soul as a window with breathIs clouded in winter's air,And all the faith one may haveLies useless and dead as a body in the grave.