The Ancestors

The house leaks and leans. Night's roof-timbers glut

To rain on those wide planks the dead have thinned

With their loud feet. Still, though the door is shut,

We sit to shudder in the rising wind.

A great bed in the chamber off the hall

Whispers its curtains. White its counterpane

And white the faces that have lain there, all

Corrupt in silence, noble, skulled by rain.

Why should the wind rise now? It never rose

Like this before! Where will the worse than poor

Porch their unsheltered beards and pierce their clothes

This night with rain? Where contemplate their store

Of pitiless thoughts? Where sleep? On nights like these,

Whose spacious wars living and dead exhume,

What calm to send the mind on the stone ease

Of passions rivalling the sculptured tomb!

Fohn Peale Bishop