* * * * *

A WALL

O the old wall here!  How I could pass
  Life in a long midsummer day,
My feet confined to a plot of grass,
  My eyes from a wall not once away!

And lush and lithe do the creepers clothe
  Yon wall I watch, with a wealth of green: 
Its bald red bricks draped, nothing loath,
  In lappets of tangle they laugh between.

Now, what is it makes pulsate the robe? 
  Why tremble the sprays?  What life o’erbrims 10
The body,—­the house no eye can probe,—­
  Divined, as beneath a robe, the limbs?

And there again!  But my heart may guess
  Who tripped behind; and she sang, perhaps: 
So the old wall throbbed, and its life’s excess
  Died out and away in the leafy wraps.

Wall upon wall are between us:  life
  And song should away from heart to heart! 
I—­prison-bird, with a ruddy strife
  At breast, and a lip whence storm-notes start—­ 20

Hold on, hope hard in the subtle thing
  That’s spirit:  tho’ cloistered fast, soar free;
Account as wood, brick, stone, this ring
  Of the rueful neighbours, and—­forth to thee!

* * * * *

CONFESSIONS

What is he buzzing in my ears? 
  “Now that I come to die,
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?”
  Ah, reverend sir, not I!

What I viewed there once, what I view again
  Where the physic bottles stand
On the table’s edge,—­is a suburb lane,
  With a wall to my bedside hand.

That lane sloped, much as the bottles do,
  From a house you could descry 10
O’er the garden-wall:  is the curtain blue
  Or green to a healthy eye?

To mine, it serves for the old June weather
  Blue above lane and wall;
And that farthest bottle labelled “Ether”
  Is the house o’er-topping all.

At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper,
  There watched for me, one June,
A girl:  I know, sir, it’s improper,
  My poor mind’s out of tune. 20

Only, there was a way ... you crept
  Close by the side, to dodge
Eyes in the house, two eyes except: 
  They styled their house “The Lodge.”

What right had a lounger up their lane? 
  But, by creeping very close,
With the good wall’s help,—­their eyes might strain
  And stretch themselves to Oes,

Yet never catch her and me together,
  As she left the attic, there, 30
By the rim of the bottle labelled “Ether,”
  And stole from stair to stair

And stood by the rose-wreathed gate.  Alas,
  We loved, sir—­used to meet;
How sad and bad and mad it was—­
  But then, how it was sweet!