The Jewish Cemetery at Newport

5The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep

6Wave their broad curtains in the southwind's breath,

7While underneath these leafy tents they keep

8The long, mysterious Exodus of Death.

9And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown,

10That pave with level flags their burial-place,

11Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down

12And broken by Moses at the mountain's base.

13The very names recorded here are strange,

14Of foreign accent, and of different climes;

15Alvares and Rivera interchange

16With Abraham and Jacob of old times.

17"Blessed be God! for he created Death!"

18The mourner said, "and Death is rest and peace!"

19Then added, in the certainty of faith,

20"And giveth Life that nevermore shall cease."

21Closed are the portals of their Synagogue,

22No Psalms of David now the silence break,

23No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue

24In the grand dialect the Prophets spake.

25Gone are the living, but the dead remain,

26And not neglected; for a hand unseen,

27Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain,

28Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green.

29How came they here? What burst of Christian hate,

30What persecution, merciless and blind,

31Drove o'er the sea -that desert desolate -

32These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?

33They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure,

34Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire;

35Taught in the school of patience to endure

36The life of anguish and the death of fire.

37All their lives long, with the unleavened bread

38And bitter herbs of exile and its fears,

39The wasting famine of the heart they fed,

40And slaked its thirst with marah of their tears.

41Anathema maranatha! was the cry

42That rang from town to town, from street to street:

43At every gate the accursed Mordecai

44Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet.

45Pride and humiliation hand in hand

46Walked with them through the world where'er they went;

47Trampled and beaten were they as the sand,

48And yet unshaken as the continent.

49For in the background figures vague and vast

50Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime,

51And all the great traditions of the Past

52They saw reflected in the coming time.

53And thus forever with reverted look

54The mystic volume of the world they read,

55Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book,

56Till life became a Legend of the Dead.

57But ah! what once has been shall be no more!

58The groaning earth in travail and in pain

59Brings forth its races, but does not restore,

60And the dead nations never rise again.