Here lies A. B. who, four years from her birth,
Found there was nowhere left to play on earth.
Strange, for her mother’s child had ever grown
In the quaint precincts of a country town,
Yet was she one whose small predestined feet
Learnt nor forgot to walk upon the street.
She might not ramble where the farmer spanned
With consecrated quickset all his land
To fill her pinafore when mushrooms swell;
Nor dare she scale the lovely citadel
Of brambles in the lane, for their sweet prize
Was spoilt with dust that dimmed the children’s eyes
When local gods dispersed the timid crowd
And went before in pillars of grey cloud.
Nor might a bigger child frequent the edge
Of the pebbled stream to plait the flowering sedge,
For aught of native life was kept without
The chosen haunt of Dives and his trout;
His pheasants held the coppice and its nuts,
Where bearded men played peep behind their butts
And wolvish keepers prowling through the woods
Had a short way with all Red Riding Hoods.
No blade of wholesome grass shot through the hard
And greasy flagstones of the narrow yard
At home, nor might the children ever play
Through the allotments where, a mile away,
The civic cabbages congested stood,
Reluctant tenants of a stony rood.
One playground, one alone, for such as she,
Had planned a grave adult humanity,
There where grey asphalt hid the ruder ground
And serried spikes begirt the place around;
At the one end, of yellow brick and slate,
Was reared a sort of female Traitors’ Gate,
At t’other end the piety of a nation
Had raised a shrine of tin to sanitation.
This, thanks to man, was all the children’s share
And Nature was allowed to tender air.
Hence did it chance (as now and then it may)
The Powers that Be decreed a holiday.
And reckless childhood, whom it ever galls
To sit within the compass of four walls,
Loosed from its wonted pen conspired to run
At random through the town beneath the sun,
Rashly disporting in the common street
Its rude hands and unnecessary feet.
That day, so many a hooting corner crost,
The marvel is that one alone was lost,
She to whom poverty no tomb assigns
But a low mound and these unworthy lines.—
Mourn not at all that Her whose burnished wing
Flies on the blissful errands of her King,
Whom (by a heavenly law too young to err,
Accounted on the earth a Trespasser)
He hath resumèd and her footfall white
Enfranchised of the liberties of light:
But for all those who play the part of Fate
To engineer this poor and mirthless state
Weep,—and for all who loved that childish hair
And saw it stained with Tragedy—one prayer.