When I am dead let not your murderous tears <br />Deface with their slow dropping my sad tomb <br />Lest your grey head grow greyer for my doom <br />And fill its echoing corridors with fears: <br />Your heart that my stone monument appears <br />While yet I live—O give it not to gloom <br />When I am dead, but let some joy illume <br />The ultimate Victory that stings and sears. <br /> <br />Already I can hear the stealthy tread <br />Of sorrow breaking through the hush of day; <br />I have no hope you will avert my dread, <br />Too well I know, that soon am mixed with clay, <br />They mourn the body who the spirit slay <br />And those that stab the living weep the dead.<br /><br />Joseph Mary Plunkett<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/when-i-am-dead-8/
