When I’m dead I want to Rest awhile in my grave: for I’m Tired, Tired
always.
My Soul must go on as it has gone on up to now.
It has a long way to go, and it has come a long way.
My Soul first started on its journey somewhere in Asia before the
dawn of this civilization. And it has gone on since through the
centuries and through strange phases of Body, terrors of flesh and
blood, suffering long. But it has gone someway on, each space of the
journey taking it nearer to the journey’s-End.
It is the dim-felt memory of those journeys that heaps the Tiredness
on me now. Not only is my spirit Tired. Through my spirit my hands
are Tired: my knees are Tired: my drooping shoulders: my thin feet:
my sensitive backbone. When I lift my hand in the sunshine the weight
of the yellow honeyed air bears down and down on it because I’m so
Tired. When I start to walk on stone pavements the ache of them is in
my feet before I set a foot on them because I’m so Tired. The pulse
in my veins Tires my blood as it beats. My low voice, though I speak
but rarely--it Tires my throat. My breath Tires my chest. The weight
of my hair Tires my forehead and temples. My plain frocks Tire my
Body to wear. My swift trenchant thoughts Tire my Mind.
It is not the Tiredness of effort though I strive to the limits of my
strength every day.
It is not pain, Restful pain. It is Tired Tiredness.
So when I’m dead I want to Rest awhile in my grave. It _would_ Rest
me.
In the Episcopal Church they use a ritual of poetic beauty, full of
Restful things. One of them is the sleep of the dead. The crucified
Nazarene slept three days. But all others of us when we go down
into our graves are to sleep until a Judgment Day. ‘Judgment Day’
is preposterous and evilly crude: there’s no judgment till each can
judge himself simply and cruelly in the morning light. But the sleep
of the dead--
--the sleep of the dead. Its sound by itself without the thought is
Restful--
And the thought is Restful.
I imagine me wrapped in a shroud of soft thin wool cloth of a pale
color, laid in a plain wood coffin: and my eyelids are closed, and my
Tired feet are dead feet, and my hands are folded on my breast. And
the coffin is nine feet down in the ground and the earth covers it.
Upon that some green sod: and above, the ancient blue deep sheltering
sky: and the clouds and the winds and the suns and moons, and the
days and nights and circling horizons--those above my grave.
And my Body laid at its length, eyes closed, hands folded, down there
Resting: my Soul not yet gone but laid beside my Body in the coffin
Resting.
--might we lie like that--Resting, Resting, for weeks, months, ages--
Year after long year, Resting.
_Stickily mad_