I am sorry for women who are growing old,
I do not blame them holding youth with shameful hold,
Or doing desperate things to lips and eyes.
They have so pitifully short a flowering time,
So suddenly sweet a story so soon told.
They only strive to keep what men have taught them most to prize—
Men who have longer, fuller lives to live,
Who are not stopped and broken in their prime,
With their faces still to summer, Men do not know
What Age says to a woman. They would not wait
To feel slip from their hands without a throe,
Without a struggle, futile and desperate,
All that has given them wealth and love and power
Doomed, without hope or rumour of reprieve.
They would not smile into the eyes of that advancing hour
Who had bent all summer to their bow, and had flung
The widest rose and kissed the keenest mouth
And slept in the lordliest bed when they were young.
That bitter twilight which sun-worshipping Youth
Flies headlong keeps Age loitering on the hill,
Uneager to fold such greyness to his breast,
Knowing that none will thwart him of his will,
None be before him on that quest.
I am growing old.
I was not always kind when I was young
To women who were old, for Youth is blind—
A small, green, bitter thing beneath its fragrant rind,
And fanged against the old with boisterous tongue—
Those whose poor morning heads are touched with rime,
Walking before their misery like kings.
I did not think that I should feel such stings,
Nor flinch beneath such arrows. But now I know.
One day I shall be stupid and rather slow,
And easily cowed and troubled in my mind,
And tremulous, vaguely frightened, feeble and cold.
I am growing old.... My God! how old, how old! ...
I dare not tell them, but one day they will know...
I hope they will be kind.
ANNUNCIATION.
"The Lord appeared in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush and behold, the bush burned with fire and the bush was not consumed."—EXODUS iii. 2.
When to your virgin heart, unstirred, ungiven,
Upon the quiet mountain side untrod,
The sudden naked fire came down from heaven,
Burning you with the very breath of God,
Was the sun lost? Were all the sweet stars dim
While God raised round your head those walls of light?
Were you locked dumbly, terribly with Him,
Within that burning temple day and night?
What was it to have God there like a bird—
God like a great, gold flower upon your breast—
While He spake things that only one man heard,
Face down before that glory manifest?
When that strange flame went up the mountain side,
Were your forsaken lips so burned with gold
That the creatures of the wild stood off and cried,
And in your breast no blossom dared unfold?
Did you call back the startled birds to build,
And put forth all your simple buds again,
Forgetting how your branches once were filled,
In sweet embrace of passing sun and rain?