The time you won your town the race, we cheered you through the market-place. Man and boy stood cheering by, as home we brought you shoulder-high.
Smart lad to slip betimes away, from fields where glory does not stay, early though the laurel grows, it withers quicker than a rose.
Now you will not swell the rout of lads that wore their honors out, runners whom renown outran, and the name died 'fore the man.
And round that early-laurelled head will flock to gaze the strengthless dead, and find unwithered on its curls, a garland briefer than a girl's.

Now take back the soul of Denys George Finch Hatton, whom you have shared with us. He brought us joy, and we loved him well. He was not ours. He was not mine.

(The film concluded with another poetic voice-over recollection, beginning as she walked away from the grave, after resisting the European custom of throwing a handful dirt onto the coffin, and as she prepared to leave Africa for good):

If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on? Or will the children invent a game in which my name is? Or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me? Or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?