Spectres that Grieve by Thomas Hardy

"IT is not death that harrows us," they lipped, / "The soundless cell is in itself relief, / For life is an unfenced flower, benumbed and nipped / At unawares, and at its best but brief."

The speakers, sundry phantoms of the gone, / Had risen like filmy flames of phosphor dye, / As if the palest of sheet lightnings shone / From the sward near me, as from a nether sky.

And much surprised was I that, spent and dead, / They should not, like the many, be at rest, / But stray as apparitions; hence I said, / "Why, having slipped life, hark you back distressed?

"We are among the few death sets not free, / The hurt, misrepresented names, who come / At each year's brink, and cry to History / To do them justice, or go past them dumb.

"We are stript of rights; our shames lie unredressed, / Our deeds in full anatomy are not shown, / Our words in morsels merely are expressed / On the scriptured page, our motives blurred, unknown."

Then all these shaken slighted visitants sped / Into the vague, and left me musing there / On fames that well might instance what they had said, / Until the New-Year's dawn strode up the air.