While from her eyes looked out
A confidence sublime as Spring’s
When stressed by Winter’s loiterings.
Thus, howsoever the wicked wiled,
She waited like a little child
Unchilled by damps of doubt.
Through cruel years and crueller
Thus she believed in him
And his aurore, so dim;
That, after fenweeds, flowers would blow;
And above all things did she show
Her faith in his good faith with her;
Through cruel years and crueller
Thus she believed in him!
BEST TIMES
We went a day’s excursion to the stream,
Basked by the bank, and bent to the ripple-gleam,
And I did not know
That life would show,
However it might flower, no finer glow.
I walked in the Sunday sunshine by the road
That wound towards the wicket of your abode,
And I did not think
That life would shrink
To nothing ere it shed a rosier pink.
Unlooked for I arrived on a rainy night,
And you hailed me at the door by the swaying light,
And I full forgot
That life might not
Again be touching that ecstatic height.
And that calm eve when you walked up the stair,
After a gaiety prolonged and rare,
No thought soever
That you might never
Walk down again, struck me as I stood there..
Rewritten from an old draft.
THE CASUAL ACQUAINTANCE
While he was here in breath and bone,
To speak to and to see,
Would I had known – more clearly known —
What that man did for me
When the wind scraped a minor lay,
And the spent west from white
To gray turned tiredly, and from gray
To broadest bands of night!
But I saw not, and he saw not
What shining life-tides flowed
To me-ward from his casual jot
Of service on that road.
He would have said: “’Twas nothing new;
We all do what we can;
’Twas only what one man would do
For any other man.”
Now that I gauge his goodliness
He’s slipped from human eyes;
And when he passed there’s none can guess,
Or point out where he lies.
INTRA SEPULCHRUM
What curious things we said,
What curious things we did
Up there in the world we walked till dead
Our kith and kin amid!
How we played at love,
And its wildness, weakness, woe;
Yes, played thereat far more than enough
As it turned out, I trow!
Played at believing in gods
And observing the ordinances,
I for your sake in impossible codes
Right ready to acquiesce.
Thinking our lives unique,
Quite quainter than usual kinds,
We held that we could not abide a week
The tether of typic minds.
– Yet people who day by day
Pass by and look at us
From over the wall in a casual way
Are of this unconscious.
And feel, if anything,
That none can be buried here