Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, IN CLONMEL PARISH CHURCHYARD; AT THE GRAVE OF CHARLES WOLFE, by SARAH MORGAN BRYAN PIATT


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

IN CLONMEL PARISH CHURCHYARD; AT THE GRAVE OF CHARLES WOLFE, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Where the graves were many, we looked for one
Last Line: In the churchyard of clonmel?
Alternate Author Name(s): Piatt, Sarah
Subject(s): Cemeteries; Clonmel, Ireland; Graveyards


WHERE the graves were many, we looked for one.
Oh, the Irish rose was red,
And the dark stones saddened the setting sun
With the names of the early dead.
Then, a child who, somehow, had heard of him
In the land we love so well,
Kept lifting the grass till the dew was dim
In the churchyard of Clonmel.

But the sexton came. "Can you tell us where
Charles Wolfe is buried?" "I can.
-- See, that is his grave in the corner there.
(Ay, he was a clever man,
If God had spared him!) It's many that come
To be asking for him," said he.
But the boy kept whispering, "Not a drum
Was heard," -- in the dusk to me.

(Then the gray man tore a vine from the wall
Of the roofless church where he lay,
And the leaves that the withering year let fall
He swept, with the ivy, away;
And, as we read on the rock the words
That, writ in the moss, we found,
Right over his bosom a shower of birds
In music fell to the ground.)

... Young poet, I wonder did you care,
Did it move you in your rest
To hear that child in his golden hair,
From the mighty woods of the West,
Repeating your verse of his own sweet will,
To the sound of the twilight bell,
Years after your beating heart was still
In the churchyard of Clonmel?





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