“SHE is dead!” they say; “she is robed for the grave; there are lilies upon her breast; | |
| Her mother has kissed her clay-cold lips, and folded her hands to rest; | |
| Her blue eyes show through the waxen lids: they have hidden her hair's gold crown; | |
| Her grave is dug, and its heap of earth is waiting to press her down.” | |
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| “She is dead!” they say to the people, her people, for whom she sung; | 5 |
| Whose hearts she touched with sorrow and love, like a harp with life-chords strung. | |
| And the people hear—but behind their tear they smile as though they heard | |
| Another voice, like a mystery, proclaim another word. | |
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| “She is not dead,” it says to their hearts; “true Singers can never die; | |
| Their life is a voice of higher things, unseen to the common eye; | 10 |
| The truths and the beauties are clear to them, God’s right and the human wrong, | |
| The heroes who die unknown, and the weak who are chained and scourged by the strong.” | |
| And the people smile at the death-word, for the mystic voice is clear: | |
| “The Singer who lived is always alive: we hearken and always hear!” | |
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| And they raise her body with tender hands, and bear her down to the main, | 15 |
| They lay her in state on the mourning ship, like the lily-maid Elaine; | |
| And they sail to her isle across the sea, where the people wait on the shore | |
| To lift her in silence with heads all bare to her home forevermore, | |
| Her home in the heart of her country; oh a grave among our own | |
| Is warmer and dearer than living on in the stranger lands alone. | 20 |
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| No need of a tomb for the Singer! Her fair hair’s pillow now | |
| Is the sacred clay of her country, and the sky above her brow | |
| Is the same that smiled and wept on her youth, and the grass around is deep | |
| With the clinging leaves of the shamrock that cover her peaceful sleep. | |
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| Undreaming there she will rest and wait, in the tomb her people make, | 25 |
| Till she hears men’s hearts, like the seeds in Spring, all stirring to be awake, | |
| Till she feels the moving of souls that strain till the bands around them break; | |
| And then I think, her dead lips will smile and her eyes be oped to see, | |
| When the cry goes out to the Nations that the Singer’s land is free! | |
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