When I am ash and memory,
I pray there will be music:
to hear once more a harmony
of sudden strings, whose sound
is such it fills the silent heavens round.
And I, but ash and memory,
would be thirds and fifths in union;
an endless polyphony
of unbounded strings, and drowned
in seas of song beyond the distant ground.
Then I, as ash and memory,
would hear the cellos calling;
hear for all eternity
celestial strings resound
and set a course for never, where they're bound.
But I, nigh ash and memory,
despair the end of music
and its mortal majesty:
its ruined strings unwound
to the violins of silence in my mound.
Quartet In G.