By the old toy cabinet,
I stand and turn over dusty things:
Chessmen--card games--hoops and balls--
Toy rifles, helmets, swords,
In the far corner
A doll's tea-set in a box.
Where are you, golden child,
Who gave tea to your dolls and me?
The golden child is growing old,
Further than Rome or Babylon
From you have passed those foolish years.
She lives--she suffers--she forgets.
By the old toy cabinet,
I idly stand and awkwardly
Finger the lock of the tea-set box.
What matter--why should I look inside,
I know not why, when I saw the little chair,
I suddenly desired to sit in it.
I know not why, when I sat in the little chair,
Everything changed, and life came back to me.
I am convinced no one at all has grown up in the house,
The break that I dreamed, itself was a dream and is broken.
I will sit in the little chair and wait,
Till the others come looking after me.
And if it is after nightfall they will come,
So much the better.
For the little chair holds me as tightly as death;
And rocking in it, I can hear it whisper strange things.
I wonder how long it has been
Since this old calendar hung here,
With my birthday date upon it,
Nothing else--not a word of writing--
Not a mark of any hand.
Perhaps it was my father
Who left it thus
For me to see.
Perhaps my mother
Smiled as she saw it;
But in later years did not smile.
If I could tear it down,
From the wall
Somehow
I would be content.
But I am afraid, as a little child, to touch it.
The clump of jessamine
Softly beneath the rain
Rocks its golden flowers.
In this room my father died:
His bed is in the corner.
No one has slept in it
Since the morning when he wakened
To meet death's hands at his heart.
I cannot go to this room,
Without feeling something big and angry
Waiting for me
To throw me on the bed,
And press its thumbs in my throat.
The clump of jessamine
Without, beneath the rain,
Rocks its golden flowers.
The fire burns low
Where it has burned ages ago,
Sinks and sighs
As it has done to a hundred eyes
Staring, staring
At the last cold smokeless glow.
Here men sat
Lonely and watched the golden grate
Turn at length black;
Heard the cooling iron crack:
Shadows, shadows,
Watching the shadows come and go.
And still the hiss
I hear, the soft fire's sob and kiss,
And still it burns
And the bright gold to crimson turns,
The wild October sky
Rises not so high,
The tree's roots that creep
Into the earth's body thrust not so deep
As our high and dark thought.
Yet thought need not roam
Far off to bring you home.
The sky is our wild mind,
Your roots are round our spirits twined,
To ours are your hearts caught.
O, never buried dead!
The living brain in the head
Is not so quick as you
Burning our conscious darkness through
With brightness past our thought.
A winter sky of pale blue and pale gold,
Bare trees, a wind that made the wood-path cold,
And one slow-moving figure, gray and old.
We met where the soft path falls from the wood
Down to the village. As I came near she stood
And answered when I spoke, drawing the hood
Back from her face. I saw only her eyes,
Large and sad. I could not bear those eyes.
They were like new graves. I could not bear her eyes.
But what we said as each passed on is gone.
We looked and spoke and passed like strangers on,
I to the high wood, she towards the paling sun.
And there, where the clear-heavened small pool lies,
And the tallest beeches brush the bending skies,
In pool and tree I saw again her eyes.
Let me not see your grief!
O, let not any see
That grief,
Nor how your heart still rocks
Like a temple with long earthquake shocks.
Let me not see
Your grief.
These eyes have seen such wrong,
Yet remained cold:
Ills grown strong,
Corruption's many-headed worm
Destroying feet that moved so firm--
Shall these eyes see
Your grief?
And that black worm has crawled
Into the brain
I have never loved you yet, if now I love.
If Love was born in that bright April sky
And ran unheeding when the sun was high,
And slept as the moon sleeps through Autumn nights
While those dear steady stars burn in their heights:
If Love so lived and ran and slept and woke
And ran in beauty when each morning broke,
Love yet was boylike, fervid and unstable,
Teased with romance, not knowing truth from fable.
But Winter after Autumn comes and stills
The petulant waters and the wild mind fills
With silence; and the dark and cold are bitter,
O, bitter to remember past days sweeter.
Then Spring with one warm cloudy finger breaks
The frost and the heart's airless black soil shakes;
On the wide fields the water gleams like snow,
And snow like water pale beneath pale sky,
When old and burdened the white clouds are stooped low.
Sudden as thought, or startled near bird's cry,
The whiteness of first light on hills of snow
New dropped from skiey hills of tumbling white
Streams from the ridge to where the long woods lie;
And tall ridge-trees lift their soft crowns of white
Above slim bodies all black or flecked with snow.
By the tossed foam of the not yet frozen brook
Black pigs go straggling over fields of snow;
The air is full of snow, and starling and rook
Are blacker amid the myriad streams of light.
Warm as old fire the Red House burns yet bright
The red sun stared unwinking at the East
Then slept under a cloak of hodden gray;
The rimy fields held the last light of day,
A little tender yet. And I remember
How black against the pale and wintry west
Stood the confused great army of old trees,
Topping that lean, enormous-shouldered hill
With crossing lances shivering and then still.
I looked as one that sees
Queens passing by and lovelier than he dreamed,
With fringe of silver light following their feet,
And all those lances vail'd, and solemn Knights
Watching their Queens as with eyes grave and sweet
They left for the gray fields those airy heights.
Nothing had lovelier seemed--
Not April's noise nor the early dew of June,
It covered all
The cold east wall,
Its green, thin gold, purple, brown,
And flame running up and down;
Lifting its quiet bosom to every wind that crept
Up the high wall and in its darkness slept.
Then when the wind slept all the creeper turned
To undiminishing fire that burned and burned and burned.
But one black night
(For not in the light
May such treacheries be done)
Came with dishonoured weapon one
And cut the stem just where the branches thin
Their million-leaf'd wild wandering begin:
Cut the firm stem quite through, and so it bled,
And all the million leaves shivered and hung there dead.