I DWELT in the shade of a city,
She far by the sea,
With folk perhaps good, gracious, witty;
But never with me.
Her form on the ballroom’s smooth flooring
I never once met,
To guide her with accents adoring
Through Weippert’s “First Set.” {46}
I spent my life’s seasons with pale ones
In Vanity Fair,
And she enjoyed hers among hale ones
In salt-smelling air.
Maybe she had eyes of deep colour,
Maybe they were blue,
Maybe as she aged they got duller;
That never I knew.
She may have had lips like the coral,
But I never kissed them,
Saw pouting, nor curling in quarrel,
Nor sought for, nor missed them.
Not a word passed of love all our lifetime,
Between us, nor thrill;
We’d never a husband-and-wife time,
For good or for ill.
Yet as one dust, through bleak days and vernal,
Lie I and lies she,
This never-known lady, eternal
Companion to me!
THE OLD GOWN
(SONG)
I HAVE seen her in gowns the brightest,
Of azure, green, and red,
And in the simplest, whitest,
Muslined from heel to head;
I have watched her walking, riding,
Shade-flecked by a leafy tree,
Or in fixed thought abiding
By the foam-fingered sea.
In woodlands I have known her,
When boughs were mourning loud,
In the rain-reek she has shown her
Wild-haired and watery-browed.
And once or twice she has cast me
As she pomped along the street
Court-clad, ere quite she had passed me,
A glance from her chariot-seat.
But in my memoried passion
For evermore stands she
In the gown of fading fashion
She wore that night when we,
Doomed long to part, assembled
In the snug small room; yea, when
She sang with lips that trembled,
“Shall I see his face again?”