bound and why,As from each gaunt street and gaping square a mist of light ascended
And dispersed upon the sky.
II
Files of evanescent faces
Passed each other without heeding, in their travail, teen, or joy,
Some in void unvisioned listlessness inwrought with pallid traces
Of keen penury’s annoy.
III
Nebulous flames in crystal cages
Leered as if with discontent at city movement, murk, and grime,
And as waiting some procession of great ghosts from bygone ages
To exalt the ignoble time.
IV
In a colonnade high-lighted,
By a thoroughfare where stern utilitarian traffic dinned,
On a red and white emblazonment of players and parts, I sighted
The name of “Rosalind,”
V
And her famous mates of “Arden,”
Who observed no stricter customs than “the seasons’ difference” bade,
Who lived with running brooks for books in Nature’s wildwood garden,
And called idleness their trade . . .
VI
Now the poster stirred an ember
Still remaining from my ardours of some forty years before,
When the selfsame portal on an eve it thrilled me to remember
A like announcement bore;
VII
And expectantly I had entered,
And had first beheld in human mould a Rosalind woo and plead,
On whose transcendent figuring my speedy soul had centred
As it had been she indeed . . .
VIII
So; all other plans discarding,
I resolved on entrance, bent on seeing what I once had seen,
And approached the gangway of my earlier knowledge, disregarding
The tract of time between.
IX
“The words, sir?” cried a creature
Hovering mid the shine and shade as ’twixt the live world and the tomb;
But the well-known numbers needed not for me a text or teacher
To revive and re-illume.
X
Then the play . . . But how unfitted
Was this Rosalind!—a mammet quite to me, in memories nurst, And with chilling disappointment soon I sought the street I had quitted, To re-ponder on the first.
XI
The hag still hawked,—I met her
Just without the colonnade. “So you don’t like her, sir?” said she.
“Ah—I was once that Rosalind!—I acted her—none better— Yes—in eighteen sixty-three.
XII
“Thus I won Orlando to me
In my then triumphant days when I had charm and maidenhood,
Now some forty years ago.—I used to say, Come woo me, woo me!” And she struck the attitude.
XIII
It was when I had gone there nightly;
And the voice—though raucous now—was yet the old one.—Clear as noon
My Rosalind was here . . . Thereon the band withinside lightly
Beat up a merry tune.
A Sunday Morning Tragedy
(circa 186–)
I bore a daughter flower-fair,
In Pydel Vale, alas for me;
I joyed to mother one so rare,
But dead and gone I now would be.
Men looked and loved her as she grew,
And she was won, alas for me;
She told me nothing, but I knew,
And saw that sorrow was to be.
I knew that one had made her thrall,
A thrall to him, alas for me;
And then, at last, she told me all,
And wondered what her end would be.
She owned that she had loved too well,
Had loved too well, unhappy she,
And bore a secret time would tell,
Though in her shroud she’d sooner be.
I plodded to her sweetheart’s door
In Pydel Vale, alas for me:
I pleaded with him, pleaded sore,
To save her from her misery.
He frowned, and swore he could not wed,
Seven times he swore it could not be;
“Poverty’s worse than shame,” he said,
Till all my hope went out of me.
“I’ve packed my traps to sail the main”—
Roughly he spake, alas did he—
“Wessex beholds me not again,
’Tis worse than any jail would be!”
