There is a portrait of my mother, at nineteen, With the black spaniel, standing by the garden seat, The dainty head held high against the painted green And throwing out the youngest smile, shy, but half haughty and half sweet. Her picture then: but simply Youth, or simply Spring To me to-day: a radiance on the wall, So exquisite, so heart-breaking a thing Beside the mask that I remember, shrunk and small, Sapless and lined like a dead leaf, All that was left of oh! the loveliest face, by time and grief! And in the glass, last night, I saw a ghost behind my chair-- Yet why remember it, when one can still go moderately gay--? Or could--with any one of the old crew, But oh! these boys! the solemn way They take you and the things they say-- This “I have only as long as you” When you remind them you are not precisely twenty-two-- Although at heart perhaps--God! if it were Only the face, only the hair! If Jim had written to me as he did to-day A year ago--and now it leaves me cold-- I know what this means, old, old, _old_! _Et avec ça--mais on a vécu, tout se paie._ That is not always true: there was my Mother--(we at least the dead are free!) Yoked to the man that Father was; yoked to the woman I am, Monty too; The little portress at the Convent School, stewing in hell so patiently; The poor, fair boy who shot himself at Aix. And what of me--and what of me? But I, I paid for what I had, and they for nothing. No, one cannot see How it shall be made up to them in some serene eternity. If there were fifty heavens God could not give us back the child who went or never came; Here, on our little patch of this great earth, the sun of any darkened day, Not one of all the starry buds hung on the hawthorn trees of last year’s May, No shadow from the sloping fields of yesterday; For every hour they slant across the hedge a different way, The shadows are never the same.