Classic Poem

Six flights up in an out-of-date apartment house
Where all the door-jambs and wainscots are of black walnut
And the last tenant died at the ripe age of eighty.
— — Tick-tock, the grandfather's clock,
— — Crowded into a corner against the black walnut wainscot.

Surrounded by the household gods of her family for three generations:
Teak-wood cabinets, rice-paper picture books, slim, comfortless chairs of spotted bamboo.
Too many house gods for the space allotted them, exuding an old and corroding beauty, a beauty faded and smelling of the past.
— — Tick-tock, the grandfather's clock,
— — Accurately telling the time, but forgetting whether it is to-day or yesterday.

Sleeping every night in a walnut bedstead
With a headboard like the end of a family pew;
Waking every morning to the photographs of dead relations,
Dead relations sifted all over the house,
Accumulated in drifts like dust or snow.
— — Tick-tock, the grandfather's clock,
— — Indifferently keeping up an old tradition,
— — Unconcernedly registering the anniversaries of illnesses and deaths,
— — But omitting the births, they were so long ago.

The lady is neither young nor old,
She walks like a wax-work among her crumbling possessions,
She is automatic and ageless like the clock,
And she, too, is of a bygone pattern.
She sits at her frugal dinner,
Careful of its ancient etiquette,
Opposite the portrait of a great-aunt
Done by a forgotten painter.
The portrait lived once, it would seem,
To judge by the coquetry of its attire;
But the lady has always been a wax-work,
Of no age in particular,
But of an unquestioned ancestry.
— — Tick-tock, the grandfather's clock,
— — Ironically recording an hour of no importance.