A CHRISTMAS GHOST-STORY
Thomas Hardy -
Poems of the Past and Present
South of the Line, inland from far
Durban,
A
mouldering soldier lies--your countryman.
Awry and doubled up are his gray
bones,
And on the breeze his puzzled
phantom moans
Nightly to clear
Canopus: "I would know
By whom and when the All-Earth-gladdening Law
Of
Peace, brought in by that
Man Crucified,
Was ruled to be
inept, and set aside?
And what of
logic or of
truth appears
In tacking '
Anno Domini' to the years?
Near twenty-hundred livened thus have hied,
But tarries yet the Cause for which
He died."
Christmas-eve, 1899.