The Suppressed Poems by Alfred Tennyson — Read

Sometimes I thought Camilla was no more, / Some one had told me she was dead, and ask'd me / If I would see her burial: then I seem'd / To rise, and thro' the forest-shadow borne / With more than mortal swiftness, I ran down / The sleepy sea-bank, till I came upon / The rear of a procession, curving round / The silver-sheeted bay: in front of which / Six stately virgins, all in white, upbare / A broad earth-sweeping pall of whitest lawn, / Wreathed round the bier with garlands: in the distance, / From out the yellow woods, upon the hill, / Look'd forth the summit and the pinnacles / Of a grey steeple.

All the pageantry, / Save those six virgins which upheld the bier, / Were stoled from head to foot in flowing black; / One walk'd abreast with me, and veiled his brow, / And he was loud in weeping and in praise / Of the departed: a strong sympathy / Shook all my soul: I flung myself upon him / In tears and cries: I told him all my love, / How I had loved her from the first; whereat / He shrunk and howl'd, and from his brow drew back / His hand to push me from him; and the face / The very face and form of Lionel, / Flash'd through my eyes into my innermost brain, / And at his feet I seemed to faint and fall, / To fall and die away. I could not rise, / Albeit I strove to follow. They pass'd on, / The lordly Phantasms; in their floating folds / They pass'd and were no more: but I had fall'n / Prone by the dashing runnel on the grass.