Elegy

Too proud to die; broken and blind he

The darkest way, and did not turn away,

A cold kind man brave in his narrow

On that darkest day,

Oh, forever

He lie lightly, at last, on the last,

Hill, under the grass, in love, and there

Young among the long flocks, and never lie

Or still all the numberless days of his death,

Above all he longed for his mother's

Which was rest and dust, and in the kind

The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.

Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,

I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,

In the muted house, one minute

Noon, and night, and light. the rivers of the

Veined his poor hand I held, and I

Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.(An old tormented man three-quarters blind,

I am not too proud to cry that He and

Will never never go out of my mind.

All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,

Being innocent, he dreaded that he

Hating his God, but what he was was plain:

An old kind man brave in his burning pride.

The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.

Even as a baby he had never cried;

Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.

Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.

Here among the light of the lording

An old man is with me where I

Walking in the meadows of his son's

On whom a world of ills came down like snow.

He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres'Last sound, the world going out without a breath:

Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,

And caught between two nights, blindness and death.

O deepest wound of all that he should

On that darkest day. oh, he could

The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.

Until I die he will not leave my side.)