When you destroy a blade of grass You poison England at her roots: Remember no man's foot can pass Where evermore no green life shoots.
You force the birds to wing too high Where your unnatural vapours creep: Surely the living rocks shall die When birds no rightful distance keep.
You have brought down the firmament And yet no heaven is more near; You shape huge deeds without event, And half made men believe and fear.
Your worship is your furnaces, Which, like old idols, lost obscenes, Have molten bowels; your vision is Machines for making more machines.
O, you are buried in the night, Preparing destinies of rust; Iron misused must turn to blight And dwindle to a tettered crust.
The grass, forerunner of life, has gone, But plants that spring in ruins and shards Attend until your dream is done: I have seen hemlock in your yards.
The generations of the worm Know not your loads piled on their soil; Their knotted ganglions shall wax firm Till your strong flagstones heave and toil.
When the old hollowed earth is cracked, And when, to grasp more power and feasts, Its ores are emptied, wasted, lacked, The middens of your burning beasts
Shall be raked over till they yield Last priceless slags for fashionings high, Ploughs to make grass in every field, Chisels men's hands to magnify.
Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire Of watching you; and swing me suddenly Into the shade and loneliness and mire Of the last land! There, waiting patiently,
One day, I think, I'll feel a cool wind blowing, See a slow light across the Stygian tide, And hear the Dead about me stir, unknowing, And tremble. And _I_ shall know that you have died.
And watch you, a broad-browed and smiling dream, Pass, light as ever, through the lightless host, Quietly ponder, start, and sway, and gleam-- Most individual and bewildering ghost!--
And turn, and toss your brown delightful head Amusedly, among the ancient Dead.
If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.