Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE TIME TO DIE by LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY

Poet Analysis

First Line: I HEARD A STRANGER'S HEARSE MOVE HEAVILY
Last Line: TO SOME CONVENIENT HOUR, THE TIME TO DIE.
Subject(s): DEATH; DEAD, THE;
There is a time to die.
KING SOLOMON.

I HEARD a stranger's hearse move heavily
Along the pavement. Its deep gloomy pall
No hand of kindred or of friend upbore.
But from the cloud, that veiled his western couch,
The lingering sun shed forth one transient ray,
Like sad and tender farewell to some plant
Which he had nourished. On the giddy crowd
Went dancing in their own enchanted maze,
Drowning the echo of those tardy wheels
Which hoarsely warn'd them of a time to die.
I saw a sable train in sorrow bend
Around a tomb. -- There was a stifled sob,
And now and then a pearly tear fell down
Upon the tangled grass. -- But then there came
The damp clod harshly on the coffin lid,
Curdling the life blood at the mourner's heart,
While audibly it spake to every ear
"There is a time to die."
And then it seemed
As if from every mound and sepulchre
In that lone cemetery -- from the sward
Where slept the span-long infant -- to the grave
Of him who dandled on his wearied knee
Three generations -- from the turf that veil'd
The wreck of mouldering beauty, to the bed
Where shrank the loathed beggar -- rose a cry
From all those habitants of silence -- "Yea! --
There is a time to die."
Methought that truth,
In every tongue, and dialect, and tone,
Peal'd o'er each region of the rolling globe;
The simoon breathed it, and the earthquake groap'd
A hollow, deep response -- the avalanche
Wrote it in terror on a snowy scroll --
The red volcano belch'd it forth in flames --
Old Ocean bore it on his whelming surge,
And you, pure, broad, cerulean arch grew dark,
With death's eternal darts. -- But joyous Man,
To whom kind heaven the ceaseless warning sent,
Turn'd to his phantom pleasures, and deferr'd,
To some convenient hour, the time to die.



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