That is the earliest thing that I remember--
The narrow house in the long narrow street,
Dark rooms within and darkness out of doors
Where grasses in the garden lift in the wind,
Long grasses clinging round unsteady feet.
The sunlight through one narrow passage pours,
As through the keyhole into a dusty room,
Striking with a golden rod the greening gloom.
The tall, tall timber-stacks have yet been kind,
Letting the sun fling his rod clear between,
Lest there should be no gold upon the green,
And no light then for a child to dream upon,
And day be of day's brightness all forlorn.
I saw those timber piles first dark and tall,
And then men clambered up, and stumbled down,
Mother said that we could go
Up on the hill where the strawberries grow.
And while I was there I looked all down,
Over the trees and over the town.
I saw the field where the big boys play,
And the roads that come from every way,
The courthouse place where the wagons stop,
And the bridge and the scales and the blacksmith shop.
The church steeple looked very tall and thin,
And I found the house that we live in.
I saw it under the poplar tree,
And I bent my head and tried to see
Our house when the rain is over it,
And how it looks when the lamps are lit.
I saw the swing from up on the hill,
The ropes were hanging very still.
The door was gone, the jambs aslant, awry,
The roof grown over with the mosses slow,
The windows stared with blank and empty eye,
Half the panes gone. The flagstones grinned below
In gaping cracks. The foolish cattle came
About the orchard, where the unpruned trees
Held to the sky white boughs of trembling flame,
And long wild grasses brushed about our knees.
The dumb house called to us, the black, wide door
Stood open for us long and stood in vain :
Sighing we guessed those old walls held a store
Of rest for us when we should come again
Into the hollow, long and green and still —
Then turned away to cross the further hill.
We walked all morning over furze and grass,
And climbed steep tufted heights against the sun,
Went down the shaven tracks, where rabbits pass,
And unalarmed the scuttling pheasants run.
There were no men in sight, save at a farm,
Where, far below, we saw, about midday,
Two ploughmen lying lapped about with warm
Rank growings of the hedge. Green buds of may
Hung over them unopened, primroses
Were yellow round their bodies. On we went,
Up a long slope through tangled coppices,
Where half-fledged hazels on the pathway leant,
Till suddenly we saw through thinning boughs
The chimneys of an old long-lonely house.
"Thin Rain, whom are you haunting,
That you haunt my door?"
--Surely it is not I she's wanting;
Someone living here before--
"Nobody's in the house but me:
You may come in if you like and see."
Thin as thread, with exquisite fingers,--
Have you seen her, any of you?--
Grey shawl, and leaning on the wind,
And the garden showing through?
Glimmering eyes,--and silent, mostly,
Sort of a whisper, sort of a purr,
Asking something, asking it over,
If you get a sound from her.--
Ever see her, any of you?--
Strangest thing I've ever known,--
My heart is what it was before,
A house where people come and go;
But it is winter with your love,
The sashes are beset with snow.
I light the lamp and lay the cloth,
I blow the coals to blaze again;
But it is winter with your love,
The frost is thick upon the pane.
I know a winter when it comes:
The leaves are listless on the boughs;
I watched your love a little while,
And brought my plants into the house.
I water them and turn them south,
I snap the dead brown from the stem;
But it is winter with your love,--
I only tend and water them.
It was only a little house of two rooms—
Almost like a child’s play-house—
With scarce five acres of ground around it;
And I had so many children to feed
And school and clothe, and a wife who was sick
From bearing children.
One day lawyer Whitney came along
And proved to me that Christian Dallman,
Who owned three thousand acres of land,
Had bought the eighty that adjoined me
In eighteen hundred and seventy-one
For eleven dollars, at a sale for taxes,
While my father lay in his mortal illness.
So the quarrel arose and I went to law.
But when we came to the proof,
A survey of the land showed clear as day
I have two monuments besides this granite obelisk:
One, the house I built on the hill,
With its spires, bay windows, and roof of slate.
The other, the lake-front in Chicago,
Where the railroad keeps a switching yard,
With whistling engines and crunching wheels
And smoke and soot thrown over the city,
And the crash of cars along the boulevard,—
A blot like a hog-pen on the harbor
Of a great metropolis, foul as a sty.
I helped to give this heritage
To generations yet unborn, with my vote
In the House of Representatives,
And the lure of the thing was to be at rest
From the never—ending fright of need,
And to give my daughters gentle breeding,
The new red houses spring like plants
In level rows
Of reddish herbage that bristles and slants
Its square shadows.
The pink young houses show one side bright
Flatly assuming the sun,
And one side shadow, half in sight,
Half-hiding the pavement-run;
Where hastening creatures pass intent
On their level way,
Threading like ants that can never relent
And have nothing to say.
Bare stems of street-lamps stiffly stand
At random, desolate twigs,
To testify to a blight on the land
That has stripped their sprigs.
Now that a crimson rambler
begins to crawl over the house
of our two lives —
Now that a red curve
winds across the shingles —
Now that hands
washed in early sunrises
climb and spill scarlet
on a white lattice weave —
Now that a loop of blood
is written on our roof
and reaching around a chimney —
How are the two lives of this house
to keep strong hands and strong hearts?
Quietly I closed the door.
Then I said to my soul:
"I shall never come back,
Back to this haunted room
Where Sorrow and I have slept."
I turned from that hated door
And passed through the House of Life,
Through its ghostly rooms and glad
And its corridors dim with age.
Then lightly I crossed a threshold
Where the casements showed the sun
And I entered an unknown room,--
And my heart went cold,
For about me stood that Chamber of Pain
I had thought to see no more!
Listen!
Footsteps
Are they,
That falter through the gloom,
That echo through the lonely chambers
Of our house of life?
Listen!
Did a door close?
Did a whisper waken?
Did a ghostly something
Sigh across the dusk?
From the mournful silence
Something, something went!
Far down some shadowy passage
Faintly closed a door--
And O how empty lies