And now!... It can not be! and yet
To see ’tis so!—In heart and brain
To know ’tis so!—While, warm and wet,
I seem to smell those scents again,
Verbena scents and rain.
I turn, in hope she ’ll bid me stay.
Again her cameo beauty mark
Set in that smile.—She turns away.
No farewell! no regret! no spark
Of hope to cheer the dark!
That sepia sketch—conceive it so—
A jaunty head with mouth and eyes
Tragic beneath a rose-chapeau,
Silk-masked, unmasking—it denies
The look we half surmise,
We know is there. ’Tis thus we read
The true beneath the false; perceive
The ache beneath the smile.—Indeed!
Whose soul unmasks?... Not mine!—I grieve,—
Oh God!—but laugh and leave....
VIII
He walks aimlessly on:
Beyond those knotted apple-trees,
That partly hide the old brick barn,
Its tattered arms and tattered knees
A scarecrow tosses to the breeze
Among the shocks of corn.
My heart is gray as is the day,
In which the rain-wind drearily
Makes all the rusty branches sway,
And in the hollows, by each way,
The dead leaves rustle wearily.
And soon we ’ll hear the far wild-geese
Honk in frost-bitten heavens under
Arcturus; when my walks must cease,
And by the fireside’s log-heaped peace
I ’ll sit and nod and ponder.—
When every fall of this loud creek
Is silent with the frost; and tented
Brown acres of the corn stretch bleak
And shaggy with the snows, that streak
The hillsides, hollow-dented;