Text: Lizette Woodworth Reese, “Westminster Churchyard,” Edgar Allan Poe: A Centenary Tribute, Baltimore: Warwick and York, 1910, pp. 15-17

Stone calls to stone, and roof to roof;

Dust unto dust; —

Lo, in the midst, starry, aloof —

Like white of April blown by last year's stalks

Across the gust —

A Presence walks.

 

It is the Shape of Song;

About it throng,

Great Others, and the first is Tears;

The ended years;

And every old and every lonely thing;

Old thirsts that to old hungers cry;

The poignancies of earth and sky;

The little sobbing of the spring.

 

He heeds them not;

They are forgot;

For him, behind this ancient wall,

The Best of all —

The short day sped;

A roof; a bed;

No years;

No tears.

 

Not his the strain Of hill or lane;

Of orchards with their humble country musk, [page 16:]

And bent old trees,

And companies of small black bees;

Of gardens at the dusk,

Where down the hush,

A thrush

His heartbreak spills;

Of daffodils

By farmhouse doors a windy sight,

A yellow gust driven down the light.

 

Nor his the note

That trumpeted of war,

Of ancient creed; Strange, innocent, remote

His reed

A wind along the hollows of an echoing shore:

Each day was but a pool within the grass,

A haunted space,

Where saw he as in glass,

But Wonder, with her dim, drowned face.

 

For Wonder was his kin,

His very twin;

Blood of his blood indeed,

And steadfast to his need; —

The ecstasies of cloud and sky;

The cry out in the dark;

The half lit spark

That lures from earth to star;

The fleeting footsteps far and far;

The trailing skirts so nigh, so nigh,

These drew he from their ghostly mesh

And made them flesh;

We reach dull hands, for we would know;

They fade; they go;

Yea, he and they together,

Into another weather. [page 17:]

 

A strange, autumnal verse;

Where griefs their griefs rehearse;

A flaw of rain within the air;

Black pools; the bough gone bare;

And red dead leaves and broken wall;

The flare of tempest driven behind them all.

 

Yet ever is his music such,

So rapt of touch,

It mellows all the ache,

And the heartbreak;

We cannot weep, but we stand wistful-eyed,

Like children at the eventide,

In some fast darkening spot,

Who hear their mother call, but see her not.

 

Oh, truest singer east or west! —

Not for the poor handful of hire,

But for the fury of the song,

The unescapable desire,

He sang his short life out, and it was best;

His wage was hunger; it was long

Betwixt the days of blame and jeers,

And that which set him with his peers;

A fragmentary song, yet dear to Art;

Its numbers hold

Enough of music for new world and old,

To shake them to the heart.

 

And now, many a summer's weather,

Now, many a winter's storms together,

The wind; the shower;

The blooms; the snows;

Have petaled into this brief hour,

And drop upon his dust a rose.

 

Roof calls to roof and stone to stone; —

Like white of April blown

The gust along — The Shape of Song!