Classic Poem

We buried in Mount Auburn last July
The gentle, clerkly, wan old bookkeeper,
Who left to me his sheaf of casual verse.

“You’ll smile,” he wrote, “to learn I poetized,
However little. Here are all my rhymes;

Too intime, surely, to be put in print
While we two lived, with whom the verses deal.
How curious that it really comforts me
To dream you’ll give them vogue, and so prolong
In mortal memory a faint, fair wraith

Of her who, while I live, is clearly shrined,
Smiling, within my unforgetting heart.”

They give the poignancy of Commonplace;
Accents of fondness, no more like the feigned
Which forms the stock of many a polished strain,

Than fields and woods enwreathed with moving mists
And changeful to the phase of hour and year
Are like a painted canvas of the scene.