I listened for a tale of leaves
And smothered ferns,
Frond-forests; and the low, sly lives
Before the fauns.
My fire might show steam-phantoms simmer
From Time's old cauldron,
Before the birds made nests in summer,
Or men had children.
But the coals were murmuring of their mine,
And moans down there
Of boys that slept wry sleep, and men
Writhing for air.
And I saw white bones in the cinder-shard,
Bones without number.
For many hearts with coal are charred,
And few remember.
‘Cinder shard’ takes the reader back to the imagery in the fist stanza of the coal fire. But the mood has changed from reverie to death — here there are ‘white bones’, those of dead soldiers and dead miners.