Touches from ash, O wych, Sting you like scorn! You, too, brave hollies, twitch Sidelong from thorn. Even the rank poplars bear Illy a rival’s air, Cankering in black despair If overborne. Since, then, no grace I find Taught me of trees, Turn I back to my kind, Worthy as these. There at least smiles abound, There discourse trills around, There, now and then, are found Life-loyalties. 1887: 1896. TO A LADY OFFENDED BY A BOOK OF THE WRITER’S NOW that my page upcloses, doomed, maybe, Never to press thy cosy cushions more, Or wake thy ready Yeas as heretofore, Or stir thy gentle vows of faith in me: Knowing thy natural receptivity, I figure that, as flambeaux banish eve, My sombre image, warped by insidious heave Of those less forthright, must lose place in thee. So be it. I have borne such. Let thy dreams Of me and mine diminish day by day, And yield their space to shine of smugger things; Till I shape to thee but in fitful gleams, And then in far and feeble visitings, And then surcease. Truth will be truth alway. TO AN ORPHAN CHILD A WHIMSEY AH, child, thou art but half thy darling mother’s; Hers couldst thou wholly be, My light in thee would outglow all in others; She would relive to me. But niggard Nature’s trick of birth Bars, lest she overjoy, Renewal of the loved on earth Save with alloy. The Dame has no regard, alas, my maiden, For love and loss like mine— No sympathy with mind-sight memory-laden; Only with fickle eyne. To her mechanic artistry My dreams are all unknown, And why I wish that thou couldst be But One’s alone! [Picture: Sketch of broken key?] NATURE’S QUESTIONING WHEN I look forth at dawning, pool, Field, flock, and lonely tree, All seem to gaze at me Like chastened children sitting silent in a school; Their faces dulled, constrained, and worn, As though the master’s ways Through the long teaching days Their first terrestrial zest had chilled and overborne. And on them stirs, in lippings mere (As if once clear in call, But now scarce breathed at all)— “We wonder, ever wonder, why we find us here! “Has some Vast Imbecility, Mighty to build and blend, But impotent to tend, Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry? “Or come we of an Automaton Unconscious of our pains? . . . Or are we live remains Of Godhead dying downwards, brain and eye now gone? “Or is it that some high Plan betides, As yet not understood, Of Evil stormed by Good, We the Forlorn Hope over which Achievement strides?”