A poet's conception of David's great grief on hearing of the death
of his son is portrayed in the following lines of N. P. Willis:
Alas! my noble boy! that thou shouldst die!
Thou, who wert made so beautifully fair!
That Death should settle in thy glorious eye,
And leave his stillness in thy clustering hair!
How could he mark thee for the silent tomb?
My proud boy, Absalom!
Cold is thy brow, my son! and I am chill,
As to my bosom I have tried to press thee
How was I wont to feel my pulses thrill,
Like a rich harp-string, yearning to caress thee,
And hear thy sweet "MY FATHER!" from these dumb
And cold lips, Absalom!
But death is on thee. I shall hear the gush
Of music, and the voices of the young;
And life will pass me in the mantling blush,
And the dark tresses to the soft winds flung;
But thou no more, with thy sweet voice, shalt come
To meet me, Absalom!
And oh! when I am stricken, and my heart,
Like a bruised reed, is waiting to be broken.
How will its love for thee, as I depart,
Yearn for thine ear to drink its last deep token!
It were so sweet, amid death's gathering gloom,
To see thee, Absalom!
And now, farewell! 'Tis hard to give thee up
With death so like a gentle slumber on thee -
And thy dark sin! Oh! I could drink the cup,
If from this woe its bitterness had won thee.
May God have called thee, like a wanderer, home,
My lost boy, Absalom!
But this fountain! What birds and beasts here drank undisturbed
before man came to assert his lordship! What multitudes of people
here have drunk from the days before Israel down to the present
time - the hunter, the tiller of the soil, the grape-gatherer, the
shepherd with his flocks, the warrior and his chief, - all rejoiced
and rested here, and were refreshed and strengthened by the water.
Almost with reverence we drink again; then we remount our horses
and proceed along the wady past the village of Ajlun where an Arab
joins us and guides us on over fertile patches of ground and
through olive groves until we reach the modern town of Coefrinje,
a town that probably contains several thousand inhabitants. It is
in the midst of an olive grove well up on the side of the
mountains. Here, although it is scarcely past the middle of the
afternoon, we stop for the night. It is too far to the next
village to risk going ahead - the way is none too safe, even by
day.
Several times to-day I could clearly distinguish the remains of
old Roman roads, well paved, and with curbing arrangement
excellently preserved. What vast sums of money and what great
amount of labor must have been expended on these old high-ways of
the time when this territory was occupied by the Romans!
