"Lay her in the earth And from her fair and unpolluted flesh May violets spring!"
A beautiful invitation follows to those, who are sometimes irreverent bearers:
"Come then, pure hands, and bear the head That sleeps or wears the mask of sleep, And come, whatever loves to weep, And hear the ritual of the dead."[18]
Even yet, before the grave is closed, he would like, as Elisha did on the Shunammite woman's child, to cast himself, and
"thro' his lips impart The life that almost dies in me;"
but still he resolves to form the firmer resolution, and to submit; though meanwhile treasuring the look and words that are past and gone for ever.
From the Danube to the Severn--from Vienna to Clevedon--the body has been conveyed, and was interred by the estuary of the latter river, where the village of Clevedon stands.[19]
The Wye, a tributary of the Severn, is also tidal; and when deepened by the sea flowing inward, its babbling ceases; but the noise recurs when the sea flows back.
So does the Poet's power of expressing his grief alternate: at times he is too full in heart to find utterance; he "brims with sorrow"--but after awhile, as when "the wave again is vocal in its wooded" banks,
"My deeper anguish also falls, And I can speak a little then."
He knows the "lesser grief" that can be told, also the "deeper anguish which cannot be spoken:" his spirits are thus variably affected.
In his lighter mood, he laments as servants mourn for a good master who has died:
"It will be hard, they say, to find Another service such as this."
But he is also visited by a sense of deeper deprivation, such as children feel when they lose a father, and
"see the vacant chair, and think, How good! how kind! and he is gone."
This Poem opens as if Hallam's grave was in the churchyard, where grasses waved; but it was not so, he was buried inside Clevedon church.
The Poet imagines the reproofs, with which passers-by will visit him for his unrestrained grief. He would "make weakness weak:" would parade his pain to court sympathy, and gain credit for constancy; and another says, that a display of private sorrow is quite inappropriate at times, when great political changes impend, and Science every month is evolving some new secret.