Dear love, I lay my hand upon thy bier;
This is the offering, all I have to give!
O Death! accept the sacrificial tear.
O Life! receive thy heritage and live.
Not what my heart would teach my tongue would frame;
My words are silent with excess of grief;
O leave me yet to call upon thy name,
Refuse the flower, but absolve the leaf!
Careless we wandered under other days,
Ere Labour claimed us for the busy mart;
Nature our mistress in her walks and ways,
Beauty our teacher, Solitude our art.
O sweet simplicity! What love was ours!
Dear Death, thou knowest not one pain to give!
O but I thank thee for thy bolts and powers;
'Twere far more blessed now to die than live.
Here rapt in childish ecstasy we played,
There loved to wander by the flowing rills,
Now, locked in pleasure, through the secret glade,
Now climbing throught the rampart of the hills.
Now lucked the painted flowers where they grew,
And gathered posies in the eye of morn;
Now watched the skylark soaring in the blue,
Or chased the caterpillar in the corn.
Soon Expectation raised the inner flame,
And strong Necessity compelled the strife,
Till sober-witted sage Experience came
And taught the discipline of daily life.
So to his several ways the other turned,
And still together, wandered each apart,
One the slow fire of emulation burned.
And one sought comfort in the realms of Art.
Till loving Purpose, merciful and kind,
Wrought its fulfilment out and closed thy breath;
Days, hopes and memories are sunk behind,
One great forgetting, one oblivion, Death.
Dear love, of earthly happiness bereft,
I know not whither now thy feet are led,
Only I know thou art no longer left
To file the general passage of the dead;
But other shores and other streams along
Thou walk'st, and lovest with a mutual eye;
There Music swells the everlasting song,
And Life's too dearly satisfied to die.
Charlie Ockwell grew up with Alfred Williams, and at first the two even lived at the same address (as shown in the 1881 census of South Marston). Charlie left South Marston for Bristol to become an engine driver, eventually marrying Esther Loxton in 1903 - the same year that Alfred married Mary. The Ockwells had two children, and Esther was pregnant with the third when Charlie died of appendicitis. Alfred was clearly filled with grief over Charlie's death, and it is probably also the subject of another poem, On a Lost Friend, which contains a reference to a grieving widow and a child who never knew her father.
See also Me and Alfred: Caroline Ockwell
Poems index
Alphabetical list of poems online
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