Our days go heavily onward,
The light that lit us of old is no more shining;
The dark has hidden our path beyond divining;
The soul that saw the East where the morning gleams
Has swept in a long flight sunward
With all its dreams.
Far past our utmost knowing!
Tears, or desirous hearts, or the death flag streaming
Vex him not in the deeps of his secret dreaming;
Passion he knows no more, nor the face of woe,
Where poppies of peace are glowing,
And sweet winds blow.[1]
I.
What does he see, what does he hear,
Through the Future’s vistas streaming—
He whom we saw on his tragic bier,
And bore to his rest on the hillside here,
On the darkest, saddest day of the year?
Does he look on the sordid scheming
Of puny pigmies for power and place?
Does Grief’s black wing throw even a trace
Of shadow over his placid face?
What does he see in his dreaming?
II.
Out on the world beneath him he looks from his high watch-tower;
No glance for the Senate Halls, where he ruled in his day of power.
Why should he care for the paltry plots of the petty brood,
Each one pursuing his own, instead of his country’s, good?
With freer and fuller sweep he looks over sea and land,
With sight made clear by the touch of the dread Magician’s wand;
His keen eye scans the Empire, wherever Britons dwell,
But first it rests on the people and the land he loved so well.
III.
Looking forth from his watch-tower, with eyes undimmed and free,
Down through New Zealand’s future, he sees what we may not see―
Sees the full-ripened fruit, the wise laws that assuage
Arrows and darts of misfortune, sorrow and sadness of age;
Sees strong Plutus degraded, grinding Monopoly prone;
Sees men reap where they sowed, each one holding his own;
Infancy nurtured, Maidenhood guarded, and Motherhood blest;
Labour ennobled and richly rewarded with guerdon of rest;
- ↑ From the “New Zealand Times” (Wellington) and “Bulletin” (Sydney).
