A dying man is asked by a clergyman whether he now sees earthly life as a "vale of tears." His answer is a blunt "not I." Instead, his mind turns the medicine bottles on his bedside table into a sunlit suburban lane. The sloping bottles become the lane; a blue curtain becomes June sky; the farthest bottle, labeled "Ether," turns into the house where a girl once waited for him. In his memory, he creeps along a garden wall to meet her, dodging the eyes of her household, and the thrill of that secret love floods back. He knows the affair was improper, even "sad and bad and mad," but its sweetness remains more real to him than any pious lesson. The poem pulses with defiant tenderness: a man on the brink of death would rather relive a hidden, passionate moment than reduce his life to a moral fable. The sickroom becomes a theater of memory, and the past outshines the present.
Confessions — Summary
What is he buzzing in my ears? "Now that I come to die, Do I view the world as a vale of tears?" Ah, reverend sir, not I!
What I viewed there once, what I view again Where the physic bottles stand On the table's edge,--is a suburb lane, With a wall to my bedside hand.
That lane sloped, much as the bottles do, From a house you could descry O'er the garden-wall: is the curtain blue Or green to a healthy eye?
To mine, it serves for the old June weather Blue above lane and wall; And that farthest bottle labelled "Ether" Is the house o'er-topping all.
At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper, There watched for me, one June, A girl: I know, sir, it's improper, My poor mind's out of tune.
Only, there was a way ... you crept Close by the side, to dodge Eyes in the house, two eyes except: They styled their house "The Lodge."
What right had a lounger up their lane? But, by creeping very close, With the good wall's help,--their eyes might strain And stretch themselves to Oes,
Yet never catch her and me together, As she left the attic, there, By the rim of the bottle labelled "Ether," And stole from stair to stair
And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas, We loved, sir--used to meet; How sad and bad and mad it was-- But then, how it was sweet!