I've lived so long companionless
In this old house bowed down with years,
I've learned to welcome loneliness,
Converse with dreams and sit with fears.
Often and often in the night
When I have laid some dull book down,
One comes between me and the light
With terrible, unrustling gown.
Wistful as moonlight in the room
Her face sways, luminous with fire
Of eyes unsmothered by the tomb.
Of lips remembering still desire.
And there beside the lute she stands
With mournful little motionings,
And stretches out her pulseless hands
And only thrusts them through the strings.
No one was with me there--
Happy I was--alone;
Yet from the sunshine suddenly
A joy was gone.
A bird in an empty house
Sad echoes makes to ring,
Flitting from room to room
On restless wing:
Till from its shades he flies,
And leaves forlorn and dim
The narrow solitudes
So strange to him.
So, when with fickle heart
I joyed in the passing day,
A presence my mood estranged
Went grieved away.
See this house, how dark it is
Beneath its vast-boughed trees!
Not one trembling leaflet cries
To that Watcher in the skies--
'Remove, remove thy searching gaze,
Innocent, of heaven's ways,
Brood not, Moon, so wildly bright,
On secrets hidden from sight.'
'Secrets,' sighs the night-wind,
'Vacancy is all I find;
Every keyhole I have made
Wail a summons, faint and sad,
No voice ever answers me,
Only vacancy.'
'Once, once...' the cricket shrills,
And far and near the quiet fills
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.
I WALK within my heart and take
The roads he led me dear and dim
To where a fragile house I make
Of broken memories of him.
Without, they build me marble halls,
They call my comrades near and far.
Oh heart, more dear the wavering walls
Where all thy shattered treasures are.
You took my empty dreams
And filled them every one
With tenderness and nobleness,
April and the sun.
The old empty dreams
Where my thoughts would throng
Are far too full of happiness
To even hold a song.
Oh, the empty dreams were dim
And the empty dreams were wide,
They were sweet and shadowy houses
Where my thoughts could hide.
But you took my dreams away
And you made them all come true--
My thoughts have no place now to play,
And nothing now to do.
From naked stones of agony
I will build a house for me;
As a mason all alone
I will raise it, stone by stone,
And every stone where I have bled
Will show a sign of dusky red.
I have not gone the way in vain,
For I have good of all my pain;
My spirit's quiet house will be
Built of naked stones I trod
On roads where I lost sight of God.
That ugly pumpkin-coloured house
That I saw from the train--
I have wondered about the minds of the people inside
But I wonder in vain.
Did they choose that paint?
Or perhaps it was brought them to buy--
Oh I hope now they’ve got it all done that they like it--
And don’t just have to try.
Oh I hope that it shines there for them
In their sunny green fields
Like a lantern at night--
And I hope that on dull rainy days they both say to each other
“Don’t it look nice and bright?”
Oh I think I shall never forget them
In their new-painted house!
The road is left; the yard;
And the old sycamore;
Larkspurs tall in the grass
Just at the door;
And the thick gusty wind that breaks
The clothes-props down;
She has a bed to make; for her tall girl
A buff-sprigged gown.
But oh, to have him back again
Flashing and young;
To sit in yonder chair,
And with delicate tongue
To talk to her of love,
And things that last —
Go call him from his grave
Where he lies fast!
As one, who comes back to a house of yore,
Some high old house in legendary trees.
And misses blue flower here; there, at the door.
Notes thinning bush, a difference in the bees;
Then enters, halts, and of a sudden knows
A face gone out, a step lost on the stair.
So I, in England. Every buffet shows
Upon her cheek; her every bone lies bare.
Yet comes not still the bloom to urban bough?
Yet pluck not girls the country thorn and sigh?
Folks buy, and sow, and neighbors go about?
Oh, different! Oh, more worth loving now.
Spent loveliness, that hurts me like a cry; —
The step lost on the stair, the face gone out!
An old and quiet house set down
A windy field or two from town.
And a great clump of lavender,
All day with cross, small bees astir.
Larkspur, hot-blue as with a sting;
And mint, so brief and sharp a thing.
Tall, well-thumbed books upon a shelf;
A green, white-flowered jug of delf.
Old friends, who from the village walk
On Sunday afternoons, to talk
Of the new shop; the guests from town;
The wind that blew the apples down.
They go; the dusk comes from afar,
Like music blown from out a star.
Those Others drift across the dew;
My early love — and you — and you!
Was ever a woman
Quite alone for a day?
Other women will come
Who should stay away.
Because my casement's open,
As I wait here for you,
Comes the faint Persephone
Trailing through the dew.
She has lived a thousand years,
Clasped her cosmic rose;
Why she comes to trouble me
Only heaven knows!
And there's another woman
Keeps whispering in my ear,
Till she has the whole house
Pierced through with fear.