Where faces are hueless, where eyelids are dewless, <br />Where passion is silent and hearts never crave; <br />Where thought hath no theme, and where sleep hath no dream, <br />In patience and peace thou art gone-to thy grave! <br />Gone where no warning can wake thee to morning, <br />Dead tho' a thousand hands stretch'd out to save. <br /> <br />Thou cam'st to us sighing, and singing and dying, <br />How could it be otherwise, fair as thou wert? <br />Placidly fading, and sinking and shading <br />At last to that shadow, the latest desert; <br />Wasting and waning, but still, still remaining. <br />Alas for the hand that could deal the death-hurt! <br /> <br />The Summer that brightens, the Winter that whitens, <br />The world and its voices, the sea and the sky, <br />The bloom of creation, the tie of relation, <br />All-all is a blank to thine ear and thine eye; <br />The ear may not listen, the eye may not glisten, <br />Nevermore waked by a smile or a sigh. <br /> <br />The tree that is rootless must ever be fruitless; <br />And thou art alone in thy death and thy birth; <br />No last loving token of wedded love broken, <br />No sign of thy singleness, sweetness and worth; <br />Lost as the flower that is drowned in the shower, <br />Fall'n like a snowflake to melt in the earth.<br /><br />George Meredith<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/requiem-31/
