leaves in order to find skeletal remains of animals and humans – remains from the time when the house was the center of a plantation based on the evil system of slavery (16-18).

Lime trees flourished once in the rich soil along the river (19-20). Both the young men and the young women who were the masters and mistresses of the plantation have long since died, but the river flows now as it did when they lived and it seems almost soothing (19-22). The speaker climbed an elaborate iron wall. It may have helped protect the owners from any attacks of conscience (perhaps by blocking constant views of the slaves).  However, the wall could not prevent the house's decay – decay symbolized by worms and mice.

A wind blowing in the remaining lime trees reminded the speaker of the writings of Rudyard Kipling, the great English author who described the decline of the British Empire while showing how the abuse of colonized peoples was justified by quotations from the Bible and enforced by military power (26-29).  Looking at the landscape of the estate, the speaker was reminded of various British explorer/poets who were the first British colonialists and whose talents as writers make their involvements in the murderous abuse of colonized people seem particularly paradoxical (31-34). The springtime of colonialism was also like a “rotting lime,” stinking like the stink of deadly slave ships (35-36). The slaveholders have long since died, but the rottenness associated with the slave system survives in such ruins (37).  However, just as ash is blown away from a fire stirred by winds, so the speaker felt renewed pain when he recalled the writings of John Donne, the great English author (38-40). Extremely angry, the speaker thought to himself: even though some slave is probably rotting in the lake I see before me, I need to remember that Albion (that is, England) was itself a colony once – colonized by the Romans divided into political factions. He recalls Donne’s words that “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main” (41-48). The speaker once again recalls words of Donne, who proclaimed that any death diminishes everyone living, just as any small loss of territory is like the loss of a friend’s manor.  The poem's final lines suggest that the speaker now feels compassion, rather than anger, when he looks at the ruined house and is reminded of all the deaths associated with it, even the deaths of the masters who profited from their now-dead slaves:

All in compassion ends
So differently from what the heart arranged: 
‘as well as if a manor of thy friend’s…’