AN AUTUMN LAY.
(By a Belated Oarsman.)
Come, little Maid, to the cracked piano,
The semi-grand in the coffee-room;
We’ll take your harmonies all cum grano,
For the strings vibrate like the crack of doom.
Over the lawn the flat clouds loom,
And when they lighten the rain falls faster;
Like gossips who relish a friend’s disaster
The ducks quack loud in the rain-ruled gloom.
I’ve studied the cracks in the ceiling-plaster,
And the statuettes with their stolid leer,
And the landscape visions of some Young Master,
Who viewed the world through a haze of beer.
We’ve done as much with the hostel’s cheer
As sane men may in corpore sano;
So come, little Maid, to the cracked piano.
Play us “The Battle of Prague,” my dear.
The silence clouds, like a potion shaken,
As the limp strings jar to an ancient pain;
Their light and sweetness no touch can waken,
And only the dregs of a tone remain.
The silk-sewn music with fray and stain
Swoons on the keys at the urgent stages,
And the little Maid, as she props the pages,
Just murmurs, “Bother!” and starts again.
And the streaming window again engages
The thoughts that stray from the field of Prague;
And the moping birds in their gauze-girt cages,
And the wax-work fruits of a genus vague;
And the flies that buzz like a lazy plague
Round the lone lorn jam, as it stands forsaken;
And the varnished pike in the mill-pool taken
About the year that they fought at Prague.
But twilight falls, and its folds encumber
The misty mounds of the patient trees,
And sunset cheers with a touch of umber
The puddles of steel-gray Gruyère cheese.
And, interposing a little ease,
Our frail thoughts dally with false surmises
Of a morning as brilliant as mid July’s is
With bravest sunshine and sweetest breeze.
A soothing silence the soul surprises,
For the little Maid, like a hero true,
Has fought her fight through its poignant crises,
And shown what practice can dare and do.
And, tearing the moonlight in handfuls through,
A giant arm in the cloudland sombre
Scatters the light on a world of slumber,
Through snowy craters, from gulfs of blue.