ARTHUR AND HELEN HALLAM; IN MEMORIAM by RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES

A BROTHER and a Sister, -- these two Friends,
Cast by fond Nature in one common mould,
And waited on by genial circumstance
In all their history of familiar love,
After a parting of not quite four years,
Are peacefully united here once more.

He first, as best beseemed the manly mind,
Tried the dark wall, which has (or seems to have)
No portion in the pleasant sun or stars,
The breath of flowers or morning-song of birds,
The hand of Friendship or the lips of Love.
Whether her sad and separated soul
Received some token from that secret place,
That she might follow him and meet him there,
Or whether God, displeased that anything
Of good or evil should so long divide
Such undefiled and sacred sympathies,
Has made them one again before his face,
Are things that we perhaps shall never know.

Say not, O world of short and broken sight!
That these died young: the bee and butterfly
Live longer in one active sunny hour
Than the poor tortoise in his torpid years:
The lofty flights of Thought through clear and cloud --
The labyrinthine ways that Poesy
Leads her beloved, the weary traverses
Of Reason, and the haven of calm Faith,
All had been theirs; their seamless brows had known
The seal of pain, the sacrament of tears;
And, unless Pride and Passion and bold Sin
Are all the rule and reckoning of our Being,
They have fulfilled as large a task of life
As ever veteran on the mortal field.

Thus they who gave these favoured creatures birth
Deem it no hard infraction of the law
Which regulates the order of our race,
That they above their offspring raise the tomb,
And with parental piety discharge
The duties filial love delights to pay:
They read the perfect sense of the design
In that which seems exception, and they mourn,
Not that these dear ones are already gone,
But that @3they@1 linger still so far behind.

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!

Other Poems of Interest...