’Times I pleased you, dear Father, dear Mother, Learned all my lessons and liked to play, And dearly I loved the little pale brother Whom some other bird must have called away. Why did They bring me here to make me Not quite bad and not quite good, Why, unless They’re wicked, do They want, in spite, to take me Back to their wet, wild wood? Now, every night I shall see the windows shining, The gold lamp’s glow, and the fire’s red gleam, While the best of us are twining twigs and the rest of us are whining In the hollow by the stream. Black and chill are Their nights on the wold; And They live so long and They feel no pain: I shall grow up, but never grow old, I shall always, always be very cold, I shall never come back again! KEN The town is old and very steep, A place of bells and cloisters and grey towers, And black clad people walking in their sleep-- A nun, a priest, a woman taking flowers To her new grave; and watched from end to end By the great Church above, through the still hours: But in the morning and the early dark The children wake to dart from doors and call Down the wide, crooked street, where, at the bend, Before it climbs up to the park, Ken’s is the gabled house facing the Castle wall. When first I came upon him there Suddenly, on the half-lit stair, I think I hardly found a trace Of likeness to a human face In his. And I said then If in His image God made men, Some other must have made poor Ken-- But for his eyes which looked at you As two red, wounded stars might do. He scarcely spoke, you scarcely heard, His voice broke off in little jars To tears sometimes. An uncouth bird He seemed as he ploughed up the street, Groping, with knarred, high-lifted feet And arms thrust out as if to beat Always against a threat of bars. And oftener than not there’d be A child just higher than his knee Trotting beside him. Through his dim Long twilight this, at least, shone clear, That all the children and the deer, Whom every day he went to see Out in the park, belonged to him. “God help the folk that next him sits He fidgets so, with his poor wits.” The neighbours said on Sunday nights When he would go to Church to “see the lights!” Although for these he used to fix His eyes upon a crucifix In a dark corner, staring on Till everybody else had gone. And sometimes, in his evil fits, You could not move him from his chair-- You did not look at him as he sat there, Biting his rosary to bits. While pointing to the Christ he tried to say “Take it away.”