Part 23

THE ROBIN

WHEN up aloft I fly and fly, I see in pools The shining sky, And a happy bird Am I, am I!

When I descend Towards their brink I stand, and look, And stoop, and drink, And bathe my wings, And chink and prink.

When winter frost Makes earth as steel I search and search But find no meal, And most unhappy Then I feel.

But when it lasts, And snows still fall, I get to feel No grief at all, For I turn to a cold stiff Feathery ball!

“I ROSE AND WENT TO ROU’TOR TOWN” (She, alone)

I ROSE and went to Rou’tor Town With gaiety and good heart, And ardour for the start, That morning ere the moon was down That lit me off to Rou’tor Town With gaiety and good heart.

When sojourn soon at Rou’tor Town Wrote sorrows on my face, I strove that none should trace The pale and gray, once pink and brown, When sojourn soon at Rou’tor Town Wrote sorrows on my face.

The evil wrought at Rou’tor Town On him I’d loved so true I cannot tell anew: But nought can quench, but nought can drown The evil wrought at Rou’tor Town On him I’d loved so true!

THE NETTLES

THIS, then, is the grave of my son, Whose heart she won! And nettles grow Upon his mound; and she lives just below.

How he upbraided me, and left, And our lives were cleft, because I said She was hard, unfeeling, caring but to wed.

Well, to see this sight I have fared these miles, And her firelight smiles from her window there, Whom he left his mother to cherish with tender care!

It is enough. I’ll turn and go; Yes, nettles grow where lone lies he, Who spurned me for seeing what he could not see.

IN A WAITING-ROOM

ON a morning sick as the day of doom With the drizzling gray Of an English May, There were few in the railway waiting-room. About its walls were framed and varnished Pictures of liners, fly-blown, tarnished. The table bore a Testament For travellers’ reading, if suchwise bent.

I read it on and on, And, thronging the Gospel of Saint John, Were figures—additions, multiplications— By some one scrawled, with sundry emendations; Not scoffingly designed, But with an absent mind,— Plainly a bagman’s counts of cost, What he had profited, what lost; And whilst I wondered if there could have been Any particle of a soul In that poor man at all,

To cypher rates of wage Upon that printed page, There joined in the charmless scene And stood over me and the scribbled book (To lend the hour’s mean hue A smear of tragedy too) A soldier and wife, with haggard look Subdued to stone by strong endeavour; And then I heard From a casual word They were parting as they believed for ever.

But next there came Like the eastern flame Of some high altar, children—a pair— Who laughed at the fly-blown pictures there. “Here are the lovely ships that we, Mother, are by and by going to see! When we get there it’s ’most sure to be fine, And the band will play, and the sun will shine!”

It rained on the skylight with a din As we waited and still no train came in; But the words of the child in the squalid room Had spread a glory through the gloom.

THE CLOCK-WINDER

IT is dark as a cave, Or a vault in the nave When the iron door Is closed, and the floor Of the church relaid With trowel and spade.

But the parish-clerk Cares not for the dark As he winds in the tower At a regular hour The rheumatic clock, Whose dilatory knock You can hear when praying At the day’s decaying, Or at any lone while From a pew in the aisle.

Up, up from the ground Around and around In the turret stair He clambers, to where The wheelwork is, With its tick, click, whizz, Reposefully measuring Each day to its end That mortal men spend In sorrowing and pleasuring Nightly thus does he climb To the trackway of Time.

Him I followed one night To this place without light, And, ere I spoke, heard Him say, word by word, At the end of his winding, The darkness unminding:—

“So I wipe out one more, My Dear, of the sore Sad days that still be, Like a drying Dead Sea, Between you and me!”

Who she was no man knew: He had long borne him blind To all womankind; And was ever one who Kept his past out of view.

OLD EXCURSIONS