A Lady of Quality
In hospital where windows meet
With sunlight in a pleasing feat
Of airy architecture
My love has sweets and grapes to eat,
The air is like a laundered sheet,
The world's a varnished picture.
Books and flowers at her head
Make living-quarters of her bed
And give a certain style
To our pillow-chat, the nonsense said
To bless the room from present dread
Just for a brittle while.
For obvious reasons we ignore
The leaping season out-of-door
Light lively as a ferret,
Woodland walks, a crocused shore,
The transcendental birds that soar
And tumble in high spirit
While under this hygienic ceiling
Where my love lies down for healing
Tiny terrors grow,
Reflected in a look, revealing
That her care is spent concealing
What, perhaps, I know.
'Ended and done with' never ceases,
Constantly the heart releases
Wild geese to the past.
Look, how they circle poignant places,
Falling to sorrow's fowling-pieces
With soft plumage aghast.
We may regret, and must abide.
Grief, the hunter's, fatal stride
Among the darkening hearts
Has gone too long on either side.
Our trophied love must now divide
Into its separate parts
And you go down with womankind
Who in her beauty has combined
And focused human hungers,
With country ladies who could wind
A nation's love-affair with mind
Around their little fingers,
While I communicate again
Recovered order to my pen
To find a further answer
As, having looked all night in vain,
A weary prince will sigh and then
Take a familiar dancer.
Now the window's turning dark
And ragged rooks across the Park
Mix with branches; all
The clocks about the building mark
The hour. The random is at work
Between us: two petals fall.
A train lifts up a lonely cry...
Our fingertips together lie
Upon the counterpane.
It will be hard, it seems, and I
Would wish my heart to justify.
What qualities remain.
love this!
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