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and the last two lines of the eighth stanza,

When faith is lost, when honor dies,

The man is dead!

The last two lines of the poem have reference to the incident narrated in Genesis 9, verses 20-23:

And Noah began to be a husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:

And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.

And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.

And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.

Read Whittier's The Lost Occasion.

ICHABOD

1

So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn
Which once he wore!

The glory from his gray hairs gone

Forevermore!

2

Revile him not, the Tempter hath

A snare for all;

And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath,
Befit his fall!

3

O, dumb be passion's stormy rage,
When he who might

Have lighted up and led his age
Falls back in night!

4

Scorn! would the angels laugh, to mark
A bright soul driven,
Fiend-goaded, down the endless dark,
From hope and heaven!

5

Let not the land once proud of him

Insult him now,

Nor brand with deeper shame his dim,
Dishonored brow.

6

But let its humble sons, instead,

From sea to lake,

A long lament, as for the dead,

In sadness make.

7

Of all we loved and honored, naught

Save power remains;

A fallen angel's pride of thought,

Still strong in chains.

8

All else is gone; from those great eyes
The soul has fled;

When faith is lost, when honor dies,
The man is dead!

9.

Then pay

the reverence of old days

To his dead fame;

Walk backward, with averted gaze,

And hide the shame!

-John Greenleaf Whittier.

THE BUGLE SONG

From The Princess.

The poem was inspired by the echoes on the lake at Killarney, during Tennyson's visit there in 1847.

All persons who have lived among the hills or the mountains have had delightful experiences with echoes, and a discussion of these experiences would be a good introduction to the study of this poem. Wonderful stories are told of the number of times an echo has repeated itself. Of the memories of childhood these are often among the most treasured.

Somewhere among these stoic rocks,
Or hidden in this cloistered dell,
Shut in by Time's unyielding locks,
Lost echoes of my boyhood dwell.

But the mountain echo is unlike our personal echoes or influence. The physical echo becomes fainter and fainter, and finally ceases entirely, but our influence goes on forever. And so the meaning, the significance, of the poem is expressed in the lines in the third stanza: Our echoes roll from soul to soul,

And grow forever and forever.

Substitute the word influence for the word echoes in the first of these two lines, and the meaning of the poem is revealed. But too much emphasis should not be placed upon the "moral" of this beautiful little lyric. The pleasure given by the first two stanzas is worth as much, perhaps, as the lesson in the third.

THE BUGLE SONG

1

The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story;
The long light shakes across the lakes,

And the wild cataract leaps in glory.

Blow, bugle, blow! set the wild echoes flying.
Blow, bugle! answer, echoes! dying, dying, dying.

2

O hark! O hear, how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O sweet and far, from cliff and scar,
The horns of Elf-land faintly blowing!

Blow! let us hear the purple glens replying.
Blow, bugle! answer, echoes! dying, dying, dying.

3

O love, they die in yon rich sky,

They faint on hill, or field, or river. Our echoes roll from soul to soul,

And grow forever and forever.

Blow, bugle, blow! set the wild echoes flying.
And answer, echoes, answer! dying, dying, dying.
-Alfred Tennyson.

Scar -a steep, rocky eminence.

WHERE LIES THE LAND?

The voyage of life is a favorite theme in poetry, and it is vividly pictured here. Life is pleasant when one has friends and the sun shines and the way is smooth (stanza two). The brave-hearted even get pleasure out of life's storms and struggles (stanza three). But whence we came and where we go are alike unknown. It is a poem of doubt, but not of despair.

WHERE LIES THE LAND?
1

Where lies the land to which the ship would go?
Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.
And where the land she travels from? Away,

Far, far behind, is all that they can say.

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