Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, LINES FOR THE INGHAM MEMORIAL AT LE ROY, 1911, by GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

LINES FOR THE INGHAM MEMORIAL AT LE ROY, 1911, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Only yesterday it was morning
Last Line: The rose, that was seed and flame.
Subject(s): Ancestry & Ancestors; History; Memory; Historians


ONLY yesterday it was morning
And the spring put forth its leaves;
We have lived; and the summer is warning
Us to bring in our sheaves;
And to all of us comes one thought
As we look to the westering sun, --
How little of all we have wrought
Was by our own hands done.

We have sown the homelands over
With the ancient seed of the home;
Broad acres of wheat and of clover
Laugh again to the sun from the loam;
But our joy as we go reaping
In the green field and the gold
Is to find the new harvest keeping
The color and weight of the old.

We remember the forms and the faces
Round our youth like an aureole;
We remember the virtues and graces
That gave us heart and soul;
But the crowning joy that we cherish,
The source and the stay of our powers,
Is to feel in our lives that perish
The work of their hands in ours.

Through times and seasons flying
We have found one thing stand sure,
One truth, among all things dying,
The years leave more secure;
Only what is spent in giving
Escapes from wealth's decay,
Only what is built into living
Never passes away.

Of the dust are man's creations;
Both dome and tower shall fall;
Dark lies on its foundations
The roof-tree of our hall;
But the homes the soul builds fasting
Of truth and art and song,
Unto the everlasting
Mansions of light belong.

We carve with last thanksgiving
The bare memorial-stone,
Where nothing now is living
And all but memory flown;
With the flower that blooms here never
We clasp the long-loved name,
But in us it lives forever,
The Rose, that was seed and flame.





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