Works

He enters, and mute on the edge of a chair
Sits a thin-faced lady, a stranger there,
A type of decayed gentility;
And by some small signs he well can guess
That she comes to him almost breakfastless.
...

"You see those mothers squabbling there?"
Remarks the man of the cemetery.
One says in tears, ''Tis mine lies here!'
Another, 'Nay, mine, you Pharisee!'
Another, 'How dare you move my flowers...

"My stick!" he says, and turns in the lane
To the house just left, whence a vixen voice
Comes out with the firelight through the pane,
And he sees within that the girl of his choice...

"I stood at the back of the shop, my dear,
But you did not perceive me.
Well, when they deliver what you were shown
I shall know nothing of it, believe me!"
...

"I'll tell being past all praying for -
Then promptly die . . . He was out at the war,
And got some scent of the intimacy
That was under way between her and me;...

"But hear. If you stay, and the child be born,
It will pass as your husband's with the rest,
While, if we fly, the teeth of scorn
Will be gleaming at us from east to west;...

"O that mastering tune?" And up in the bed
Like a lace-robed phantom springs the bride;
"And why?" asks the man she had that day wed,
With a start, as the band plays on outside....

They stand confronting, the coffin between,
His wife of old, and his wife of late,
And the dead man whose they both had been
Seems listening aloof, as to things past date....

"O lonely workman, standing there
In a dream, why do you stare and stare
At her grave, as no other grave there were?

"If your great gaunt eyes so importune...

We are always saying
"Good-bye, good-bye!"
In work, in playing,
In gloom, in gaying:
At many a stage
Of pilgrimage
From youth to age
We say, "Good-bye,
Good-bye!"
...

Through snowy woods and shady
We went to play a tune
To the lonely manor-lady
By the light of the Christmas moon.

We violed till, upward glancing
To where a mirror leaned,...

Along the way
He walked that day,
Watching shapes that reveries limn,
And seldom he
Had eyes to see
The moment that encompassed him.

Bright yellowhammers
Made mirthful clamours,...

Here goes a man of seventy-four,
Who sees not what life means for him,
And here another in years a score
Who reads its very figure and trim.

The one who shall walk to-day with me...

They bear him to his resting-place -
In slow procession sweeping by;
I follow at a stranger's space;
His kindred they, his sweetheart I.
Unchanged my gown of garish dye,...

She charged me with having said this and that
To another woman long years before,
In the very parlour where we sat, -

Sat on a night when the endless pour
Of rain on the roof and the road below...

She did not turn,
But passed foot-faint with averted head
In her gown of green, by the bobbing fern,
Though I leaned over the gate that led
From where we waited with table spread;
But she did not turn:...

There was a time in former years -
While my roof-tree was his -
When I should have been distressed by fears
At such a night as this!

I should have murmured anxiously,...

I was sitting,
She was knitting,
And the portraits of our fore-folk hung around;
When there struck on us a sigh;
"Ah - what is that?" said I:
"Was it not you?" said she. "A sigh did sound."
...

(The neighbourhood of Leghorn: March, 1887)



Somewhere afield here something lies
In Earth's oblivious eyeless trust
That moved a poet to prophecies -
A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust
...

I have come to the church and chancel,
Where all's the same!
- Brighter and larger in my dreams
Truly it shaped than now, meseems,
Is its substantial frame.
But, anyhow, I made my vow,...