EUTHANATOS

Forth of our ways and woes,

Forth of the winds and snows,

A white soul soaring goes,

Winged like a dove:

So sweet, so pure, so clear,

So heavenly tempered here,

Love need not hope or fear her changed above:

Ere dawned her day to die,

So heavenly, that on high

Change could not glorify

Nor death refine her:

Pure gold of perfect love,

On earth like heaven's own dove,

She cannot wear, above, a smile diviner.

Her voice in heaven's own quire

Can sound no heavenlier lyre

Than here: no purer fire

Her soul can soar:

No sweeter stars her eyes

In unimagined skies

Beyond our sight can rise than here before.

Hardly long years had shed

Their shadows on her head:

Hardly we think her dead,

Who hardly thought her

Old: hardly can believe

The grief our hearts receive

And wonder while they grieve, as wrong were wrought her.

But though strong grief be strong

No word or thought of wrong

May stain the trembling song,

Wring the bruised heart,

That sounds or sighs its faint

Low note of love, nor taint

Grief for so sweet a saint, when such depart.

A saint whose perfect soul,

With perfect love for goal,

Faith hardly might control,

Creeds might not harden:

A flower more splendid far

Than the most radiant star

Seen here of all that are in God's own garden.

Surely the stars we see

Rise and relapse as we,

And change and set, may be

But shadows too:

But spirits that man's lot

Could neither mar nor spot

Like these false lights are not, being heavenly true.

Not like these dying lights

Of worlds whose glory smites

The passage of the nights

Through heaven's blind prison:

Not like their souls who see,

If thought fly far and free,

No heavenlier heaven to be for souls rerisen.

A soul wherein love shone

Even like the sun, alone,

With fervour of its own

And splendour fed,

Made by no creeds less kind

Toward souls by none confined,

Could Death's self quench or blind, Love's self were dead.