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Home  »  library  »  poem  »  Westminster Abbey

C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Westminster Abbey

By Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)

October 12th, 1892

“Gieb diesen Todten mir heraus!”

The Minster speaks
BRING me my dead!

To me that have grown,

Stone laid upon stone,

As the stormy brood

Of English blood

Has waxed and spread

And filled the world,

With sails unfurled;

With men that may not lie;

With thoughts that cannot die.

Bring me my dead!

Into the storied hall,

Where I have garnered all

My harvest without weed;

My chosen fruits of goodly seed;

And lay him gently down among

The men of State, the men of song:

The men that would not suffer wrong,

The thought-worn chieftains of the mind,

Head servants of the human kind.

Bring me my dead!

The autumn sun shall shed

Its beams athwart the bier’s

Heaped blooms; a many tears

Shall flow; his words, in cadence sweet and strong,

Shall voice the full hearts of the silent throng.

Bring me my dead!

And oh! sad wedded mourner, seeking still

For vanished hand-clasp, drinking in thy fill

Of holy grief; forgive, that pious theft

Robs thee of all save memories left.

Not thine to kneel beside the grassy mound,

While dies the western glow, and all around

Is silence, and the shadows closer creep

And whisper softly, All must fall asleep.