When youth sang in their bosoms like a bird....
Sweet that divine musician, Memory,
Fingering her many-reeded melody.

Then as he stared into the wasting glow
And watched the fire faint in the whitening wood,
Came starker shadows moving vast and slow,
And echoes of wild strife and smell of blood,
Twitching of slain men, cries of parting woe,
Bruised bodies ghastly in the mountain flood;
Burials and burnings, triumph with terrors blent,
And widowed languors and night-long lament.

Like seeds long buried, these dead memories
Upthrust in their new green and spread to flower:
An eager child against his father's knees
Leaning, he had listened many an evening hour.
Now these remote reworded histories
Entangled with his own renewed their power,
Breathing an antique virtue through his mind,
As through dense yew boughs breathes the undying wind.

Sighing, he rose up softly. On the wall
A dark shape shambled aimless to and fro;
Head bent, eyes inward-seeing, rugged, tall,
Himself a shadow moved with musings slow
Amid his cumbered past, and heard sweet call
Of mother voice, and mother folk, and flow
Of gentle and proud speech and tender laughter,
Story and song, fault and forgiveness after;