At the Old Year's Grave

Hark! ‘Tis a tolling bell!
     On the icy, midnight air
Far shudders and echoes an iron knell, 
Nor whence it comes may the watcher tell, 
     For it vibrates everywhere!
Twelve times the funereal hammer
Clangs with reverberant clamor,
     While a solemn death-march wails in the
           tree-tops stark and bare!

See! There are twelve gray gnomes
     With visages weird and wan,
Who, out of their subterranean homes, 
And dun with the reek of their cavernous domes,
     With mattock and spade move on,
To the measured clang of the tolling;
While a hoarse voice, all controlling,
     Cries: "Dig me a grave to-night, for an old
          Year dead and gone!"

They dig the frozen clod,
     They cleave the bituminous shale, 
The lime-rock yields like an arable sod, 
And the very granite feels the prod 
     Of their keen picks flung like hail.
And ever the hoarse voice urges-
"Deeper! dig deeper !" and dirges,
     Ever more cold and dismal, in the windy
          tree-tops wail.

And now they cease, they are near 
     The central fire's lagoons;
Twelve specters approach with a skeleton bier, 
Bearing the corse of the perished Year, 
     Twelve ghosts of his pallid moons!
The hoarse voice cries: "To the centre!
Go down; there are more to enter!"
     The pale corse sinks, while the knell's last
          shiver to silence swoons.

Now dim in the moonless air
     I see the Century stand;
His long, gray beard, and his thin, white hair 
Like phosphorus flames in the wind-flaws flare;
     And his mien is calm and grand,
As he bids all souls deliver
To that Lethean grave's Forever
     The secret sin and the open wrong that
          shadow our golden land.

"Thou, Divès, cast thy greed 
     To the pit thou, else, shalt fill, 
And share thy gold with the famishing need 
That thy very dogs have pitied, indeed, 
     With a tenderer good will.
Thou too, O Lazarus, bury
Thy envious spleen, and be merry
     With crumbs that fall to the helpless, whom
          the good Lord loveth still.

"False Teacher, there's room below
     For thy solemn frauds, and the hollow show 
That flaunts for knowledge what none can know;
     And thou, whose soul is but sense,
Cast-in the pride of thy reason
That spurns all faith as treason
     If it dare transcend the line of thy little garden
          fence."

"Into that cavernous maw
     Where the dead years disappear,
Fling all the wrongs that the dead Year saw,
False loves, and hates, and gnaw the pangs that
     The unloved and hopeless here.
Then over them rear the temple 
Of righteousness, broad and ample,
     For the joy of a world renewed in this happy,
          glad New Year!"