MEMORIAL VERSES ON THE DEATH OF WILLIAM BELL SCOTT

A life more bright than the sun's face, bowed

Through stress of season and coil of cloud,

Sets: and the sorrow that casts out fear

Scarce deems him dead in his chill still shroud,

Dead on the breast of the dying year,

Poet and painter and friend, thrice dear

For love of the suns long set, for love

Of song that sets not with sunset here,

For love of the fervent heart, above

Their sense who saw not the swift light move

That filled with sense of the loud sun's lyre

The thoughts that passion was fain to prove

In fervent labour of high desire

And faith that leapt from its own quenched pyre

Alive and strong as the sun, and caught

From darkness light, and from twilight fire.

Passion, deep as the depths unsought

Whence faith's own hope may redeem us nought,

Filled full with ardour of pain sublime

His mourning song and his mounting thought.

Elate with sense of a sterner time,

His hand's flight clomb as a bird's might climb

Calvary: dark in the darkling air

That shrank for fear of the crowning crime,

Three crosses rose on the hillside bare,

Shown scarce by grace of the lightning's glare

That clove the veil of the temple through

And smote the priests on the threshold there.

The soul that saw it, the hand that drew,

Whence light as thought's or as faith's glance flew,

And stung to life the sepulchral past,

And bade the stars of it burn anew,

Held no less than the dead world fast

The light live shadows about them cast,

The likeness living of dawn and night,

The days that pass and the dreams that last.

Thought, clothed round with sorrow as light,

Dark as a cloud that the moon turns bright,

Moved, as a wind on the striving sea,

That yearns and quickens and flags in flight,

Through forms of colour and song that he

Who fain would have set its wide wings free

Cast round it, clothing or chaining hope

With lights that last not and shades that flee.

Scarce in song could his soul find scope,

Scarce the strength of his hand might ope

Art's inmost gate of her sovereign shrine,

To cope with heaven as a man may cope.

But high as the hope of a man may shine

The faith, the fervour, the life divine

That thrills our life and transfigures, rose

And shone resurgent, a sunbright sign,

Through shapes whereunder the strong soul glows

And fills them full as a sunlit rose

With sense and fervour of life, whose light

The fool's eye knows not, the man's eye knows.

None that can read or divine aright

The scriptures writ of the soul may slight

The strife of a strenuous soul to show

More than the craft of the hand may write.

None may slight it, and none may know

How high the flames that aspire and glow

From heart and spirit and soul may climb

And triumph; higher than the souls lie low

Whose hearing hears not the livelong rhyme,

Whose eyesight sees not the light sublime,

That shines, that sounds, that ascends and lives

Unquenched of change, unobscured of time.

A long life's length, as a man's life gives

Space for the spirit that soars and strives

To strive and soar, has the soul shone through

That heeds not whither the world's wind drives

Now that the days and the ways it knew

Are strange, are dead as the dawn's grey dew

At high midnoon of the mounting day

That mocks the might of the dawn it slew.

Yet haply may not — and haply may —

No sense abide of the dead sun's ray

Wherein the soul that outsoars us now

Rejoiced with ours in its radiant sway.

Hope may hover, and doubt may bow,

Dreaming. Haply — they dream not how —

Not life but death may indeed be dead

When silence darkens the dead man's brow.

Hope, whose name is remembrance, fed

With love that lightens from seasons fled,

Dreams, and craves not indeed to know,

That death and life are as souls that wed.

But change that falls on the heart like snow

Can chill not memory nor hope, that show

The soul, the spirit, the heart and head,

Alive above us who strive below.