Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 4. THE TRYSTING, by EDWARD CARPENTER


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 4. THE TRYSTING, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Far over the hills, ten miles, in the cloudless summer morning
Last Line: And gains her presence at the feet of god.
Subject(s): Absence; Cemeteries; Death; Flowers; Graves; Love; Mothers; Separation; Isolation; Graveyards; Dead, The; Tombs; Tombstones


FAR over the hills, ten miles, in the cloudless summer morning,
By grassy slopes and flowering wheatfields, and over the brooks, he
strides—
A young man, slender, wistful-eyed—with a great bouquet of flowers in
his hand.

Great roses, red and white (in the cottage-home garden gathered),
And sweet-scented ladslove and rich marigolds and mignonette and lilies,
All trembling in the glimmer of brimming eyes, and steeped in fragrant
memories,
With full full heart he carries,
And calls in spirit, the while he goes, to her so loved—
More than all other women on earth beloved—
His mother who bore him.
Till at length by the town arriving,
On her grave in the cemetery ground he faithfully lays them.

And this the trysting.
This the trysting for which in the little garden, with tears, he gathered
the flowers,
For which o'er the hills he hastened.—
And this, what means, what boots it?

There truly, below, with head fallen on one side, a shapeless
indistinguishable mass, her body lies—
Three years already from this life departed—
Nor hears nor sees, nor understands at all,
Senseless as any clod.
Above, the flowers he has brought lie wilting in the sun;
Around, the common-place dingy scene extends—the dreary cemetery,
The stones, the walls, the houses.—
What boots it all?
These senseless things that neither see nor hear,
To senseless things what message can they bear?

Yet he, he hears and sees.
A natural child, untaught, reckless of custom and what they call religion,
He hears and sees things hidden from the learned;
He glimpses forms beyond the walls of Time.
Of bibles, creeds and churches he knows nothing,
And all that science has said about life and death and atom-dances and the
immutable laws of matter,
And all the impassable lines and barriers that the professors and
specialists have built up out of their own imaginations—
These simply exist not, for him.
He only knows she comes, the loved and worshiped—
Comes, takes the flowers,
Stands like a thin mist in the sun beside him,
Looks in his eyes, and touches him again.

And to its depth his heart shakes, breaking backward,
Tears rise once more, earth reels, the sun is splintered,
Stones, houses, and the solid sky dissolve,
And that far marvelous vibration of the soul,
Swifter than light, more powerful than sound,
Flies through the world, pierces the rocks and tombs,
And gains her Presence at the feet of God.





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