Plumed to every twig’s end
I could tempt her chair under me. Much did I treasure her
During those days she had nothing to pleasure her;
Mutely she used me as friend.
I’m a skeleton now,
And she’s gone, craving warmth. The rime sticks like a skin to me;
Through me Arcturus peers; Nor’lights shoot into me;
Gone is she, scorning my bough!
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?
THE YOUNG GLASS-STAINER
“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.