I play my sweet old airs -
The airs he knew When our love was true -
But he does not balk His determined walk, And passes up the stairs.
I sing my songs once more, And presently hear His footstep near As if it would stay;
But he goes his way, And shuts a distant door.
So I wait for another morn And another night In this soul-sick blight;
And I wonder much As I sit, why such A woman as I was born!
"MY SPIRIT WILL NOT HAUNT THE MOUND"
My spirit will not haunt the mound Above my breast, But travel, memory-possessed, To where my tremulous being found Life largest, best.
My phantom-footed shape will go When nightfall grays Hither and thither along the ways I and another used to know In backward days.
And there you'll find me, if a jot You still should care For me, and for my curious air;
If otherwise, then I shall not, For you, be there.
WESSEX HEIGHTS (1896)
There are some heights in Wes***, shaped as if by a kindly hand For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand, Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly, I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.
In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man's friend -
Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to mend:
Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I, But mind-chains do not clank where one's next neighbour is the sky.
In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways -
Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days:
They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things -
Men with a frigid sneer, and women with tart disparagings.
Down there I seem to be false to myself, my ****** self that was, And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this, Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.
I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there's a figure against the moon, Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune;
I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now passed For everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast.
There's a ghost at Yell'ham Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the night, There's a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin lipped and vague, in a shroud of white, There is one in the railway-train whenever I do not want it near, I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would not hear.
As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers, I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers;
Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know;
Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go.
So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west, Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest, Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me, And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty.
