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On A Friend Recently Dead

by Sir John Collings Squire

The stream goes fast.

When this that is the present is the past,

'Twill be as all the other pasts have been,

A failing hill, a daily dimming scene,

A far strange port with foreign life astir

The ship has left behind, the voyager

Will never return to; no, nor see again,

Though with a heart full of longing he may strain

Back to project himself, and once more count

The boats, the whitened walls that climbed the mount,

Mark the cathedral's roof, the gathered spires,

The vanes, the windows red with sunset's fires,

The gap of the market-place, and watch again

The coloured groups of women, and the men

Lounging at ease along the low stone wall

That fringed the harbour; and there beyond it all

High pastures morning and evening scattered with small

Specks that were grazing sheep.... It is all gone,

It is all blurred that once so brightly shone;

He cannot now with the old clearness see

The rust upon one ringbolt of the quay.

And yesterday is dead, and you are dead.

Your duplicate that hovered in my head

Thins like blown wreathing smoke, your features grow

To interrupted outlines, and all will go

Unless I fight dispersal with my will...

So I shall do it ... but too conscious still

That, when we walked together, had I known

How soon your journey was to end alone,

I should not, now that you have gone from view,

Be gathering derelict odds and ends of you;

But in the intense lucidity of pain

Your likeness would have burnt into my brain.

I did not know; lovable and unique,

As volatile as a bubble and as weak,

You sat with me, and my eyes registered

This thing and that, and sluggishly I heard

Your voice, remembering here and there a word.

III

So in my mind there's not much left of you,

And that disintegrates; but while a few

Patches of memory's mirror still are bright

Nor your reflected image there has quite

Faded and slipped away, it will be well

To search for each surviving syllable

Of voice and body and soul. And some I'll find

Right to my hand, and some tangled and blind

Among the obscure weeds that fill the mind.

A pause....

I plunge my thought's hooked resolute claws

Deep in the turbid past. Like drowned things in the jaws

Of grappling-irons, your features to the verge

Of conscious knowledge one by one emerge.

Can I not make these scattered things unite? ...

I knit my brows and clench my eyelids tight

And focus to a point.... Streams of dark pinkish light

Convolve; and now spasmodically there flit

Clear pictures of you as you used to sit:,

The way you crossed your legs stretched in your chair,

Elbow at rest and tumbler in the air,

Jesting on books and politics and worse,

And still good company when most perverse.

Capricious friend!

Here in this room not long before the end,

Here in this very room six months ago

You poised your foot and joked and chuckled so.

Beyond the window shook the ash-tree bough,

You saw books, pictures, as I see them now,

The sofa then was blue, the telephone

Listened upon the desk, and softly shone

Even as now the fire-irons in the grate,

And the little brass pendulum swung, a seal of fate

Stamping the minutes; and the curtains on window and door

Just moved in the air; and on the dark boards of the floor

These same discreetly-coloured rugs were lying...

And then you never had a thought of dying.

You are not here, and all the things in the room

Watch me alone in the gradual growing gloom.

The you that thought and felt are I know not where,

The you that sat and drank in that arm-chair

Will never sit there again.

For months you have lain

Under a graveyard's green

In some place abroad where I've never been.

Perhaps there is a stone over you,

Or only the wood and the earth and the grass cover you.

But it doesn't much matter; for dead and decayed you lie

Like a million million others who felt they would never die,

Like Alexander and Helen the beautiful,

And the last collier hanged for murdering his trull;

All done with and buried in an equal bed.

Yes, you are dead like all the other dead.

You are not here, but I am here alone.

And evening falls, fusing tree, water and stone

Into a violet cloth, and the frail ash-tree hisses

With a soft sharpness like a fall of mounded grain.

And a steamer softly puffing along the river passes,

Drawing a file of barges; and silence falls again.

And a bell tones; and the evening darkens; and in sparse rank

The greenish lights well out along the other bank.

I have no force left now; the sights and sounds impinge

Upon me unresisted, like raindrops on the mould.

And, striving not against my melancholy mood,

Limp as a door that hangs upon one failing hinge,

Limp, with slack marrowless arms and thighs, I sit and brood

On death and death and death. And quiet, thin and cold,

Following of this one friend the hopeless, helpless ghost,

The weak appealing wraiths of notable men of old

Who died, pass through the air; and then, host after host,

Innumerable, overwhelming, without form,

Rolling across the sky in awful silent storm,

The myriads of the undifferentiated dead

Whom none recorded, or of whom the record faded.

O spectacle appallingly sublime!

I see the universe one long disastrous strife,

And in the staggering abysses of backward and forward time

Death chasing hard upon the heels of creating life.

And I, I see myself as one of a heap of stones

Wetted a moment to life as the flying wave goes over,

Onward and never returning, leaving no mark behind.

There's nothing to hope for. Blank cessation numbs my mind,

And I feel my heart thumping gloomy against its cover,

My heavy belly hanging from my bones.

Below in the dark street

There is a tap of feet,

I rise and angrily meditate

How often I have let of late

This thought of death come over me.

How often I will sit and backward trace

The deathly history of the human race,

The ripples of men who chattered and were still,

Known and unknown, older and older, until

Before man's birth I fall, shivering and aghast

Through a hole in the bottom of the remotest past;

Till painfully my spirit throws

Her giddiness off; and then as soon

As I recover and try to think again,

Life seems like death; and all my body grows

Icily cold, and all my brain

Cold as the jagged craters of the moon....

And I wonder is it not strange that I

Who thus have heard eternity's black laugh

And felt its freezing breath,

Should sometimes shut it out from memory

So as to play quite prettily with death,

And turn an easy epitaph?

I can hear a voice whispering in my brain:

"Why this is the old futility again!

Criminal! day by day

Your own life is ebbing swiftly away.

And what have you done with it,

Except to become a maudlin hypocrite?"

Yes, I know, I know;

One should not think of death or the dead overmuch; but one's mind's made so

That at certain times the roads of thought all lead to death,

And false reasoning clouds one's soul as a window with breath

Is clouded in winter's air,

And all the faith one may have

Lies useless and dead as a body in the grave.