All’s Well [poem by Louisa Lawson]

[Editor: This poem by Louisa Lawson was published in “The Lonely Crossing” and Other Poems (1905).]

All’s Well.

It is years to-night since alone I sat
By a new-made grave on a burial plat,
With the night dews o’er me falling.

And I cried in my grief, “Oh, God! My God!
What can it avail that beneath this sod
My child lies deaf to my calling?”

And the watchman cried on his round, “All’s well!”
And oh, at his mocking my heart did swell —
With thoughts of a childless morrow.

But again he is on his midnight round,
And his words to me have a soothing sound;
For the years have brought me sorrow

And have taught me what it was hard to know,
And have made me reap where I did not sow,
And along strange paths have brought me.

They have shown me too, in their painful round
That my girl is safe in the silent ground,
And this, too, faith has taught me:

That I’ll see her in a blood-washed throng
Unsoiled by sin, and unseared by wrong.
Amen! to the Watchman’s cry to-night,
My heart re-echoes, “All’s well, all’s right.”

Source:
Louisa Lawson, “The Lonely Crossing” and Other Poems, Sydney: Dawn Office, [1905], pp. 87-88

Editor’s notes:
This poem is apparently about the death of a child.

o’er = (archaic) over (pronounced the same as “oar”, “or”, and “ore”)

sod = earth, dirt, soil (especially with grass on it); turf; a section of grassy area cut out of the earth, usually cut out in a rectangular or square shape

[Editor: Changed “All’s well all’s right” to “All’s well, all’s right” (added a comma).]