Classic Poem

1

I MIND no more, nor care to understand,
Those dull brutalities too long endured;
I only thought of work as I came forth
Most fitted to my convalescent hand;
Of old ambitions haply I am cured.
This city builded nobly in the North
Affords me refuge from an outworn land.

2

Somewhile I drifted without any plans,
And found no place until this night work came
For words misspelt and letters gone askew
In the rigmarole the glum proof-reader scans
I've now good lodging of a simple dame
In a cottage rustic where all else is new
On a quiet street of decent artizans

3

I wonder what she was at seventeen,
This landlady of mine so withered now
With three score round of years. Her cheeriness
O'ercomes her poverty and widowed mien;
She treasures little things, and tells me how
She keeps the fashion of her Sabbath dress, —
Her velvet bonnet and silk grenadine.

4

Her cottage has a wholesome atmosphere
Of golden thyme and rue and mignonette;
It seems from days too secular withdrawn,
A place to meditate, or in austere
Clean solitude to sleep and to forget
The inevitable ache of things forgone;
'Twas surely some good fairy led me here.

5

My room is high and bare; a window shows
A maple tree without where sparrows keep
In constant parlement; the other looks
Blankly 'gainst a wall; that one I close.
To ease my soul I laid upon a heap
Of long, unopened, Calvinistic books
The splendid contradiction of a rose.

6

As some be curious in choice of wines
From wattled bottles and monastic jugs,
Or crusted kegs in roguish cellars hid,
So I've been fond with many anodynes,
Most dopy sirops and oblivious drugs,
To baffle pain and droop the uneasy lid,
And loose the soul from all its rough confines.

7

But now to wines or drugs I give no thought,
Nor seek relief as in my evil day
When evil things conspired to batter me
Until with stress and anguish overwrought
I think some rampart of my brain gave way;
For in the truce of this pale apathy
The past appears a dream — the future naught.

8

In a grimy office of the Daily Blink
A reader's desk is set apart for me,
And there at night I work from eight till four
The wage is fair, with little need to think;
In automatic way unerringly.
Tho' but a novice, I correct and score
The acrid galleys rank with printer's ink.

9

A cozy creamerie they call the Star
At one o'clock I visit hungrily,
For rolls and coffee and a bowl of soup;
The place is spotless kept, and popular
With sober night-hawks dining frugally;
Me they class there with a favored group —
Good fellows all as printers always are.

10

'Tis well nigh dawn before I find my bed
Where everything is clean prepared for me.
A monoplane of dreams with wings unfurled
I fancy it, the pillow 'neath my head,
As smoothly up some vast acclivity
In spreading spiral ways I leave the World;
Of it and all things over-wearied.

11

Luxurious I sleep the morning through,
Or lie awake, inert with lazy eyes
Fixt on the bars of light that slip between
The close green-shuttered windows palely blue.
And under no compulsion yet to rise,
And with no mordant thought to intervene,
I doze and dream alternately till two,

12

And day by day thus unconcerned I live,
Forgetting former things that did me wrong;
Thankful for this safe obscurity,
And glad for the added comfort I can give
One poor old woman who has lived too long;
Of late I find her growing motherly,
And in her harmless way inquisitive.

13

She wonders much at me and at my ways;
I am to her a man of mystery,
Because I breakfast in the afternoon.
But pleased she always is to have me praise
Her toast and marmalade and good black tea;
And the porridge bowl, and her last silver spoon,
Worn thin with usage since Victorian days.

14

And in that hour of other times she talks;
Once this cottage was the Manse, she says,
And the city reached not here to bar at all
The Minister from his long evening walks;
It vexes her to see brick terraces
Now crowding 'gainst the very garden wall
Where still his sunflowers grow, and hollyhocks.

15

Yestermorn with plaintive roundelay
Came to our street the hurdy-gurdy man;
The wheeling melody of his machine
Gave color to my dreaming as I lay,
Remote as some Tibetan caravan,
Or marvel once of Marco Polo seen
Down jaded avenues of old Cathay.

16

The rudest music heard thro' sleep is fine
Beyond the reach of art or instruments;
With tunefulest high magic I have crost
Over the violet edge of lands divine,
And lifting many jeweled trophies thence
I wake with joy — but waking they are lost
Along the dim, dream-tangled border line.

17

A wind-swept common far from streets and towers
I found to-day with thistles overrun;
The year is on the turn, the summer yields,
The waning season all the air endowers
With the deeper gold of our September sun,
Reluctant yet to leave the long-loved fields,
Now mauve and blue with elvish autumn flowers.

18

For me what remnant fate remains in store?
What dull or useless ending will be mine?
I count these days detached, this work unplaced,
I know the best of me has gone before,
And all that youth once promised I resign;
But lone on that allegiant, floral waste
I bared my head to Beauty evermore.

19

And still she comes to me, tho' I be old,
Living in covered ways and namelessly;
And still her fields of amaranth await,
And glorious across the manifold
Dim valleys of the dead exalt I see
Her azure gardens gleaming, and the great
Marble towers of morning tipt with gold.