What know we of the dead, who say these things,
Or of the life in death below the mould,
What of the mystic laws that rule the old
Gray realms beyond our poor imaginings
Where death is life? The bird with spray-wet wings
Knows more of what the deeps beneath him hold.
Let be: warm hearts shall never wax a-cold,
But burn in roses through eternal springs:
For all the vanished fruit and flower of Time
Are flower and fruit in worlds we cannot see,
And all we see is as a shadow-mime
Of things unseen, and Time that comes to flee
Is but the broken echo of a rhyme
In God's great epic of Eternity.