In a moonlit exchange, John Gorham confronts Jane Wayland, claiming he has come to tell her what she really is. He sees her as a pretty but cruel flirt—a butterfly in a garden or a cat that toys with a mouse. Jane pushes back, threatens to vanish, then softens and asks him to look past her foolishness and find the real woman in her. John, however, has already withdrawn. He doubts he has the time and compares them to forgotten broken urns, with nothing left worth saying. The mood is weary, brittle, and quietly final: two people circling an ending, one hoping for another chance and the other too disillusioned to care.
John Gorham — Summary
"Tell me what you're doing over here, John Gorham, Sighing hard and seeming to be sorry when you're not; Make me laugh or let me go now, for long faces in the moonlight Are a sign for me to say again a word that you forgot."-- "I'm over here to tell you what the moon already May have said or maybe shouted ever since a year ago; I'm over here to tell you what you are, Jane Wayland, And to make you rather sorry, I should say, for being so."-- "Tell me what you're saying to me now, John Gorham, Or you'll never see as much of me as ribbons any more; I'll vanish in as many ways as I have toes and fingers, And you'll not follow far for one where flocks have been before."-- "I'm sorry now you never saw the flocks, Jane Wayland, But you're the one to make of them as many as you need. And then about the vanishing. It's I who mean to vanish; And when I'm here no longer you'll be done with me indeed."-- "That's a way to tell me what I am, John Gorham! How am I to know myself until I make you smile? Try to look as if the moon were making faces at you, And a little more as if you meant to stay a little while."-- "You are what it is that over rose-blown gardens Makes a pretty flutter for a season in the sun; You are what it is that with a mouse, Jane Wayland, Catches him and lets him go and eats him up for fun."-- "Sure I never took you for a mouse, John Gorham; All you say is easy, but so far from being true That I wish you wouldn't ever be again the one to think so; For it isn't cats and butterflies that I would be to you."-- "All your little animals are in one picture-- One I've had before me since a year ago to-night; And the picture where they live will be of you, Jane Wayland, Till you find a way to kill them or to keep them out of sight."-- "Won't you ever see me as I am, John Gorham, Leaving out the foolishness and all I never meant? Somewhere in me there's a woman, if you know the way to find her. Will you like me any better if I prove it and repent?" "I doubt if I shall ever have the time, Jane Wayland; And I dare say all this moonlight lying round us might as well Fall for nothing on the shards of broken urns that are forgotten, As on two that have no longer much of anything to tell."