My life's blossom might have bloomed on all sides
Save for a bitter wind which stunted my petals
On the side of me which you in the village could see.
From the dust I lift a voice of protest:
My flowering side you never saw!
Ye living ones, ye are fools indeed
Who do not know the ways of the wind
And the unseen forces
That govern the processes of life.
If on water and sweet bread
Seven years I'll add to life,
For me will no blood be shed,
No lamb know the evil knife;
Excellently will I dine
On a crust and Adam's wine.
If a bed in monkish cell
Well mean old of age to me,
Let me in a convent dwell,
And from fellow men be free;
Let my mellow sunset days
Pass in piety and praise.
For I love each hour I live,
Wishing it were twice as long;
Dawn my gratitude I give,
Laud the Lord with evensong:
Now that moons are sadly few
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Severer Service of myself
I—hastened to demand
To fill the awful Vacuum
Your life had left behind—
I worried Nature with my Wheels
When Hers had ceased to run—
When she had put away Her Work
My own had just begun.
I strove to weary Brain and Bone—
To harass to fatigue
The glittering Retinue of nerves—
Vitality to clog
To some dull comfort Those obtain
Who put a Head away
They knew the Hair to—
And forget the color of the Day—
The happiest moment in a woman's life
Is when she hears the turn of her lover's key
In the lock, and pretends to be asleep
When he enters the room, trying to be
Quiet but clumsy, bumping into things,
And she can smell the liquor on his breath
But forgives him because she has him back
And doesn't have to sleep alone.
The happiest moment is a man's life
Is when he climbs out of bed
With a woman, after an hour's sleep,
After making love, and pulls on
His trousers, and walks outside,
SENT TO A FRIEND WITH A VOLUME OF TENNYSON
Wouldst thou know the knightly clash of steel on steel?
Or list the throstle singing loud and clear?
Or walk at twilight by some haunted mere
In Surrey; or in throbbing London feel
Life's pulse at highest--hark, the minster's peal! . . .
Turn but the page, that various world is here!
Chide me not, darling, that I sing
Familiar thoughts and metres old:
Nay, do not scold
My spirit's childish uttering.
I know not why 't is that or this
I murmur to you thus or so:
Only I know
It throbs across my silences,
It blows over my heart,—a long
Infinite wind, again, again!
Again! and then
My life kneels down into a song.
I
My child and I hold hands on the way to school,
And when I leave him at the first-grade door
He cries a little but is brave; he does
Let go. My selfish tears remind me how
I cried before that door a life ago.
I may have had a hard time letting go.
Each fall the children must endure together
What every child also endures alone:
Learning the alphabet, the integers,
Three dozen bits and pieces of a stuff
So arbitrary, so peremptory,
That worlds invisible and visible
My life's joy and incense: recollection of those hours
when I found and captured pleasure as I wanted it.
My life's joy and incense: that I refused
all indulgence in routine love affairs.
My Master is a man of might
With manners like a hog;
He makes me slave from morn to night
And treats me like a dog.
He thinks there's nothing on this earth
His money cannot buy,
And claims to get full wages worth
From hirelings such as I.
But does he? Though a Man of State,
And fabulously rich,
He little guesses that his mate
Is just a bonny bitch.
For he is grey and gross and fat,
While I am tall and slim,
And when he's gone it happens that
Some deem I'm gentle, some I'm kind:
It may be so,--I cannot say.
I know I have a simple mind
And see things in a simple way;
And like a child I love to play.
I love to toy with pretty words
And syllable them into rhyme;
To make them sing like sunny birds
In happy droves with silver chime,
In dulcet groves in summer time.
I pray, with hair more white than grey,
And second childhood coming on,
That yet with wonderment I may
See life as in its lucent dawn,
And be by beauty so beguiled
