Living still on—and onward, maybe,Till Doom’s great day be!
Sunday, August 13, 1916.
AT THE WORD “FAREWELL”
She looked like a bird from a cloud
On the clammy lawn,
Moving alone, bare-browed
In the dim of dawn.
The candles alight in the room
For my parting meal
Made all things withoutdoors loom
Strange, ghostly, unreal.
The hour itself was a ghost,
And it seemed to me then
As of chances the chance furthermost
I should see her again.
I beheld not where all was so fleet
That a Plan of the past
Which had ruled us from birthtime to meet
Was in working at last:
No prelude did I there perceive
To a drama at all,
Or foreshadow what fortune might weave
From beginnings so small;
But I rose as if quicked by a spur
I was bound to obey,
And stepped through the casement to her
Still alone in the gray.
“I am leaving you . . . Farewell!” I said,
As I followed her on
By an alley bare boughs overspread;
“I soon must be gone!”
Even then the scale might have been turned
Against love by a feather,
—But crimson one cheek of hers burned
When we came in together.
FIRST SIGHT OF HER AND AFTER
A day is drawing to its fall
I had not dreamed to see;
The first of many to enthrall
My spirit, will it be?
Or is this eve the end of all
Such new delight for me?
I journey home: the pattern grows
Of moonshades on the way:
“Soon the first quarter, I suppose,”
Sky-glancing travellers say;
I realize that it, for those,
Has been a common day.
THE RIVAL
I determined to find out whose it was—
The portrait he looked at so, and sighed;
Bitterly have I rued my meanness
And wept for it since he died!
I searched his desk when he was away,
And there was the likeness—yes, my own!
Taken when I was the season’s fairest,
And time-lines all unknown.
I smiled at my image, and put it back,
And he went on cherishing it, until
I was chafed that he loved not the me then living,
But that past woman still.
Well, such was my jealousy at last,
I destroyed that face of the former me;
Could you ever have dreamed the heart of woman
Would work so foolishly!
HEREDITY
I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.
The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance—that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die.
“YOU WERE THE SORT THAT MEN FORGET”
You were the sort that men forget;
Though I—not yet!—
Perhaps not ever. Your slighted weakness
Adds to the strength of my regret!
You’d not the art—you never had
For good or bad—
To make men see how sweet your meaning,
Which, visible, had charmed them glad.
You
