Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses

Excerpt

AN UPBRAIDING

Now I am dead you sing to me
   The songs we used to know,
But while I lived you had no wish
   Or care for doing so.

Now I am dead you come to me
   In the moonlight, comfortless;
Ah, what would I have given alive
   To win such tenderness!

When you are dead, and stand to me
   Not differenced, as now,
But like again, will you be cold
   As when we lived, or how?

"These Gothic windows, how they wear me out
With cusp and foil, and nothing straight or square,
Crude colours, leaden borders roundabout,
And fitting in Peter here, and Matthew there!

"What a vocation! Here do I draw now
The abnormal, loving the Hellenic norm;
Martha I paint, and dream of Hera's brow,
Mary, and think of Aphrodite's form."

Nov. 1893.

LOOKING AT A PICTURE ON AN ANNIVERSARY

But don't you know it, my dear,
   Don't you know it,
That this day of the year
(What rainbow-rays embow it!)
We met, strangers confessed,
   But parted—blest?

Though at this query, my dear,
   There in your frame
Unmoved you still appear,
You must be thinking the same,
But keep that look demure
   Just to allure.

And now at length a trace
   I surely vision
Upon that wistful face
Of old-time recognition,
Smiling forth, "Yes, as you say,
   It is the day."

For this one phase of you
   Now left on earth
This great date must endue
With pulsings of rebirth? -
I see them vitalize
   Those two deep eyes!

But if this face I con
   Does not declare
Consciousness living on
Still in it, little I care
To live myself, my dear,
   Lone-labouring here!

Spring 1913.

He often would ask us
That, when he died,
After playing so many
To their last rest,
If out of us any
Should here abide,
And it would not task us,
We would with our lutes
Play over him
By his grave-brim
The psalm he liked best -
The one whose sense suits
"Mount Ephraim" -
And perhaps we should seem
To him, in Death's dream,
Like the seraphim.

As soon as I knew
That his spirit was gone
I thought this his due,
And spoke thereupon.
"I think," said the vicar,
"A read service quicker
Than viols out-of-doors
In these frosts and hoars.
That old-fashioned way
Requires a fine day,
And it seems to me
It had better not be."

Hence, that afternoon,
Though never knew he
That his wish could not be,
To get through it faster
They buried the master
Without any tune.

But 'twas said that, when
At the dead of next night
The vicar looked out,
There struck on his ken
Thronged roundabout,
Where the frost was graying
The headstoned grass,
A band all in white
Like the saints in church-glass,
Singing and playing
The ancient stave
By the choirmaster's grave.

Such the tenor man told
When he had grown old.

THE MAN WHO FORGOT

At a lonely cross where bye-roads met
   I sat upon a gate;
I saw the sun decline and set,
   And still was fain to wait.

A trotting boy passed up the way
   And roused me from my thought;
I called to him, and showed where lay
   A spot I shyly sought....