I could not think of thee as piecèd rot,
Yet such thou wert, for thou hadst been long dead;
Yet thou liv'dst entire in my seeing
And what thou wert in me had never fled.
Nay,
I had fixed the moments of thy beauty--Thy ebbing smile, thy kiss's readiness,
And memory had taught my heart the
To know thee ever at that deathlessness.
But when I came where thou wert laid, and
The natural flowers ignoring thee sans blame,
And the encroaching grass, with casual flaw,
Framing the stone to age where was thy name, I knew not how to feel, nor what to be Towards thy fate's material secrecy.
