Cowper’s Newton

p. 95 Once was a pair of Friends, who loved to chance Their feet in any by-way of Romance: They, like two vagabond schoolboys, unafraid Of stark impossibilities, essayed To make these Penitent and Impenitent Thieves, These Pews and Gaunts, each man of them with his sheaves Of humour, passion, cruelty, tyranny, life, Fit shadows for the boards; till in the strife Of dream with dream, their Slaver-Saint came true, And their Blind Pirate, their resurgent Pew (A figure of deadly farce in his new birth), Tap-tapped his way from Orcus back to earth; And so, their Lover and his Lass made one, In their best prose this Admiral here was done.

p. 95

Pews

Gaunts

Pew

Orcus

One of this Pair sleeps till the crack of doom Where the great ocean-rollers plunge and boom: The other waits and wonders what his Friend, Dead now, and deaf, and silent, were the end Revealed to his rare spirit, would find to say If you, his lovers, loved him for this Play.

p. 99IV. EPICEDIA

p. 99

TWO DAYS (February 15—September 28, 1894)

To V. G.

That day we brought our Beautiful One to lie In the green peace within your gates, he came To give us greeting, boyish and kind and shy, And, stricken as we were, we blessed his name: Yet, like the Creature of Light that had been ours, Soon of the sweet Earth disinherited, He too must join, even with the Year’s old flowers, The unanswering generations of the Dead. So stand we friends for you, who stood our friend Through him that day; for now through him you know That though where love was, love is till the end, Love, turned of death to longing, like a foe, Strikes: when the ruined heart goes forth to crave Mercy of the high, 

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