SIR WALTER RALEIGH
Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618), British statesman, explorer, and poet of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, was executed by the court of King James I, after the death of Queen Elizabeth. This prayer—this meditation on the immutability of the grave, and the hope of resurrection—was written the night before his beheading, and was his final poem and epitaph.
473
EVEN SUCH IS TIME, THAT TAKES IN TRUST
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with earth and dust;
Who, in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days:
But from this earth, this grave, this dust
My God shall raise me up, I trust!