35 Sonnets — Sonnet IV

IV.

I could not think of thee as piecèd rot, Yet such thou wert, for thou hadst been long dead;

Yet thou liv’dst entire in my seeing thought And what thou wert in me had never fled.

Nay, I had fixed the moments of thy beauty— Thy ebbing smile, thy kiss’s readiness, And memory had taught my heart the duty To know thee ever at that deathlessness.

But when I came where thou wert laid, and saw The natural flowers ignoring thee sans blame, And the encroaching grass, with casual flaw, Framing the stone to age where was thy name, I knew not how to feel, nor what to be Towards thy fate’s material secrecy.