Frederick Philip Grove
THE DIRGE
(IM 15, 1-33)

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e-Edition by Gaby Divay
© August 2007

University of Manitoba Libraries	FPG & FrL Collections	University of Manitoba Archives

XXVIII. "What will this mean..."[19] by Frederick Philip Grove What will this mean ten thousand years from now When we are dead and gone and quite forgotten, When bones are dust and our firm flesh is rotten, And this world lives without us anyhow; When changes such as we cannot conceive Have sculptured plains and mountain chains eroded; When all our superstitions are exploded, And people laugh at what we still believe; When souls, with a new eagerness instinct, Communicate perhaps in closer fashion, When sympathy is more than pale compassion, When even language is perhaps extinct; When there no longer are grim murder bars Dividing us from weaker sister races; When converse through the intermundane spaces This planet holds with all the reeling stars? What does it mean to us that long ago;, In the abyss of time, where man emerges, A sorrowing greybeard muttered broken dirges And stared as blind, on Asia's great plateau? Or that an inarticulate Eskimo With wide-flung gesture, silent, shrugged his shoulder As in the ice, so that it would not moulder, He laid his child upon an arctic floe? Oh, why should I be fearful of the night[20] That summons from the grave and coffin oaken The shape unseen, the speech long, long unspoken Of one who lived in day's intenser light? Wide lies the past at night, with many a token That it is truth, not dream which wiles my sight-- As if for disappointment to requite When, with the rise of day, my sleep is broken. If I could sleep and sleep and never waken And dream and dream of what is not but was, Then both hope and faith remain unshaken. But ah, there comes a point when shadows pause, And when I wake and find myself forsaken And doubly feel the grief that bores and gnaws. In Memoriam 15/28