How we played at love, And its wildness, weakness, woe; Yes, played thereat far more than enough As it turned out, I trow! Played at believing in gods And observing the ordinances, I for your sake in impossible codes Right ready to acquiesce. Thinking our lives unique, Quite quainter than usual kinds, We held that we could not abide a week The tether of typic minds. —Yet people who day by day Pass by and look at us From over the wall in a casual way Are of this unconscious. And feel, if anything, That none can be buried here Removed from commonest fashioning, Or lending note to a bier: No twain who in heart-heaves proved Themselves at all adept, Who more than many laughed and loved, Who more than many wept, Or were as sprites or elves Into blind matter hurled, Or ever could have been to themselves The centre of the world. THE WHITEWASHED WALL WHY does she turn in that shy soft way Whenever she stirs the fire, And kiss to the chimney-corner wall, As if entranced to admire Its whitewashed bareness more than the sight Of a rose in richest green? I have known her long, but this raptured rite I never before have seen. —Well, once when her son cast his shadow there, A friend took a pencil and drew him Upon that flame-lit wall. And the lines Had a lifelike semblance to him. And there long stayed his familiar look; But one day, ere she knew, The whitener came to cleanse the nook, And covered the face from view. “Yes,” he said: “My brush goes on with a rush, And the draught is buried under; When you have to whiten old cots and brighten, What else can you do, I wonder?” But she knows he’s there. And when she yearns For him, deep in the labouring night, She sees him as close at hand, and turns To him under his sheet of white. JUST THE SAME I SAT. It all was past; Hope never would hail again; Fair days had ceased at a blast, The world was a darkened den. The beauty and dream were gone, And the halo in which I had hied So gaily gallantly on Had suffered blot and died! I went forth, heedless whither, In a cloud too black for name: —People frisked hither and thither; The world was just the same. THE LAST TIME THE kiss had been given and taken, And gathered to many past: It never could reawaken; But you heard none say: “It’s the last!” The clock showed the hour and the minute, But you did not turn and look: You read no finis in it, As at closing of a book. But you read it all too rightly When, at a time anon, A figure lay stretched out whitely, And you stood looking thereon. THE SEVEN TIMES