Intimations of Immortality from recollections of Early Childhood with Mrs. Jonnes on the Occasion of her 85th Birthday (with apologies to William Wordsworth)

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The Earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparll’d in celestial light,
The glory and freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
Like a wave in a stream That throws itself back; In midnight black,
It sometime hath returned in a recurring dream,
In lucid slumber, a momentary gleam —
The Entoto vista is vast and wide,
Mother and I, side by side, Hand in hand, heart to heart,
We stand up high in the primal gard’n;
We hear the echoes in the mountain throng,
And see glimpses of angels in Heavenly song.

So much of life is a quest
To recover one’s early bliss;
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower, Memories of Mother,
Reveries of Eden,
Doth remain to rouse the cinders,
And send up hope of Heaven rediscovered.

Although decades have passed,
And time goes by all too fast,
When I spend a day with Mother now,
My soul is revived somehow;
I think the man again becomes the child, And is to Life’s grim strife more reconciled.
I raise a song of praise to the mother-child bond, In which glimmers of immortality may be found.