And to the God who cut your life short, pray

That he as early to your sight restore me

As from my own he swept you far away.

Luis de Camoëns (1527–80),
translated from the Portuguese by
Roy Campbell

In Memoriam E. S.

Ah most unreliable of all women of grace

in the breathless hurry of your leave-taking

you forgot – you forgot for ever – our last embrace.

George Barker (1913–91)

WORN FEATURES OF ANCESTRAL MOULD …

To live in the hearts of those we leave behind is not to die.

inscription on a headstone in
Lytham St Annes, Lancashire

Highland Graveyard

Today a fine old face has gone under the soil;

For generations past women hereabouts have borne

Her same name and stamp of feature.

Her brief identity was not her own

But theirs who formed and sent her out

To wear the proud bones of her clan, and live its story,

Who now receive back into the ground

Worn features of ancestral mould.

A dry-stone wall bounds off the dislimned clay

Of many an old face forgotten and young face gone

From boundless nature, sea and sky.

A wind-withered escalonia like a song

Of ancient tenderness lives on

Some woman’s living fingers set as shelter for the dead, to tell

In evergreen unwritten leaves,

In scent of leaves in western rain

That one remembered who is herself forgotten.

Many songs they knew who now are silent.

Into their memories the dead are gone

Who haunt the living in an ancient tongue

Sung by old voices to the young,

Telling of sea and isles, of boat and byre and glen;

And from their music the living are reborn

Into a remembered land,

To call ancestral memories home

And all that ancient grief and love our own.

Kathleen Raine (1908–2003)

‘Another and another and another’

Another and another and another

And still another sunset and sunrise,

The same yet different, different yet the same,

Seen by me now in my declining years

As in my early childhood, youth and manhood;

And by my parents and my parents’ parents,

And by the parents of my parents’ parents,

And by their parents counted back for ever,

Seen, all their lives long, even as now by me;

And by my children and my children’s children

And by the children of my children’s children

And by their children counted on for ever

Still to be seen as even now seen by me;

Clear and bright sometimes, sometimes dark and clouded

But still the same sunsetting and sunrise;

The same for ever to the never ending

Line of observers, to the same observer

Through all the changes of his life the same:

Sunsetting and sunrising and sunsetting,

And then again sunrising and sunsetting,

Sunrising and sunsetting evermore.

James Henry (1798–1876)

‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,

Nor the furious winter’s rages,

Thou thy worldly task hast done

Home art gone and ta’en thy wages.