Part 11

So fair a fancy few would weave In these years! Yet, I feel, If someone said on Christmas Eve, “Come; see the oxen kneel

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used to know,” I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so.

1915.

THE TRESSES

“WHEN the air was damp It made my curls hang slack As they kissed my neck and back While I footed the salt-aired track I loved to tramp.

“When it was dry They would roll up crisp and tight As I went on in the light Of the sun, which my own sprite Seemed to outvie.

“Now I am old; And have not one gay curl As I had when a girl For dampness to unfurl Or sun uphold!”

THE PHOTOGRAPH

THE flame crept up the portrait line by line As it lay on the coals in the silence of night’s profound, And over the arm’s incline, And along the marge of the silkwork superfine, And gnawed at the delicate bosom’s defenceless round.

Then I vented a cry of hurt, and averted my eyes; The spectacle was one that I could not bear, To my deep and sad surprise; But, compelled to heed, I again looked furtive-wise Till the flame had eaten her breasts, and mouth, and hair.

“Thank God, she is out of it now!” I said at last, In a great relief of heart when the thing was done That had set my soul aghast, And nothing was left of the picture unsheathed from the past But the ashen ghost of the card it had figured on.

She was a woman long hid amid packs of years, She might have been living or dead; she was lost to my sight, And the deed that had nigh drawn tears Was done in a casual clearance of life’s arrears; But I felt as if I had put her to death that night! . . .

* * *

—Well; she knew nothing thereof did she survive, And suffered nothing if numbered among the dead; Yet—yet—if on earth alive Did she feel a smart, and with vague strange anguish strive? If in heaven, did she smile at me sadly and shake her head?

ON A HEATH

I COULD hear a gown-skirt rustling Before I could see her shape, Rustling through the heather That wove the common’s drape, On that evening of dark weather When I hearkened, lips agape.

And the town-shine in the distance Did but baffle here the sight, And then a voice flew forward: “Dear, is’t you? I fear the night!” And the herons flapped to norward In the firs upon my right.

There was another looming Whose life we did not see; There was one stilly blooming Full nigh to where walked we; There was a shade entombing All that was bright of me.

AN ANNIVERSARY

IT was at the very date to which we have come, In the month of the matching name, When, at a like minute, the sun had upswum, Its couch-time at night being the same. And the same path stretched here that people now follow, And the same stile crossed their way, And beyond the same green hillock and hollow The same horizon lay; And the same man pilgrims now hereby who pilgrimed here that day.

Let so much be said of the date-day’s sameness; But the tree that neighbours the track, And stoops like a pedlar afflicted with lameness, Knew of no sogged wound or windcrack. And the joints of that wall were not enshrouded With mosses of many tones, And the garth up afar was not overcrowded With a multitude of white stones, And the man’s eyes then were not so sunk that you saw the socket-bones.

KINGSTON-MAURWARD EWELEASE.

“BY THE RUNIC STONE” (Two who became a story)

BY the Runic Stone They sat, where the grass sloped down, And chattered, he white-hatted, she in brown, Pink-faced, breeze-blown.

Rapt there alone In the transport of talking so In such a place, there was nothing to let them know What hours had flown.

And the die thrown By them heedlessly there, the dent It was to cut in their encompassment, Were, too, unknown.

It might have strown Their zest with qualms to see, As in a glass, Time toss their history From zone to zone!

THE PINK FROCK