FAIR images of sleep, Hallowed, and soft, and deep, On whose calm lids the dreamy quiet lies, Like moonlight on shut bells Of flowers in mossy dells, Filled with the hush of night and summer skies! How many hearts have felt Your silent beauty melt Their strength to gushing tenderness away! How many sudden tears, From depths of buried years All freshly bursting, having confessed your sway! How many eyes will shed Still, o'er your marble bed, Such drops from memory's troubled fountains wrung -- While hope hath blights to bear, While love breathes mortal air, While roses perish ere to glory sprung! Yet from a voiceless home, If some sad mother come Fondly to linger o'er your lovely rest, As o'er the cheek's warm glow, And the sweet breathings low, Of babes that grew and faded on her breast; If then the dove-like tone Of those faint murmurs gone, O'er her sick sense too piercingly return; If for the soft bright hair, And brow and bosom fair, And life, now dust, her soul too deeply yearn; O gentle forms, entwined Like tendrils, which the wind May wave, so clasped, but never can unlink! Send from your calm profound A still, small voice -- a sound Of hope, forbidding that lone heart to sink! By all the pure, meek mind In your pale beauty shrined, By childhood's love -- too bright a bloom to die -- O'er her worn spirit shed, O fairest, holiest dead! The faith, trust, joy, of immortality! | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...TO THE VIRGINS, TO MAKE MUCH OF TIME by ROBERT HERRICK ELEGIAC SONNET: 7. ON THE DEPARTURE OF THE NIGHTINGALE by CHARLOTTE SMITH TO THE RIGHT HON! WILLIAM EARL OF DARTMOUTH by PHILLIS WHEATLEY FRAGMENTS INTENDED FOR DEATH'S JEST-BOOK: SORROW by THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES CONCERNING I AND NON-I by JOHN STUART BLACKIE |