The Three Taverns Part 7

I see him now as I could see him then, And I see now that it was good for me, As it was good for him, that I was quiet; For Time's eye was on Ferguson, and the shaft Of its inquiring hesitancy had touched him, Or so I chose to fancy more than once Before he told of Norcross. When the word Of his release (he would have called it so) Made half an inch of news, there were no tears That are recorded. Women there may have been To wish him back, though I should say, not knowing, The few there were to mourn were not for love, And were not lovely. Nothing of them, at least, Was in the meagre legend that I gathered Years after, when a chance of travel took me So near the region of his nativity That a few miles of leisure brought me there; For there I found a friendly citizen Who led me to his house among the trees That were above a railroad and a river.

Square as a box and chillier than a tomb It was indeed, to look at or to live in -- All which had I been told. "Ferguson died,"

The stranger said, "and then there was an auction.

I live here, but I've never yet been warm.

Remember him? Yes, I remember him.

I knew him -- as a man may know a tree -- For twenty years. He may have held himself A little high when he was here, but now . . .

Yes, I remember Ferguson. Oh, yes."

Others, I found, remembered Ferguson, But none of them had heard of Tasker Norcross.

A Song at Shannon's

Two men came out of Shannon's having known The faces of each other for as long As they had listened there to an old song, Sung thinly in a wastrel monotone By some unhappy night-bird, who had flown Too many times and with a wing too strong To save himself, and so done heavy wrong To more frail elements than his alone.

Slowly away they went, leaving behind More light than was before them. Neither met The other's eyes again or said a word.

Each to his loneliness or to his kind, Went his own way, and with his own regret, Not knowing what the other may have heard.

Souvenir

A vanished house that for an hour I knew By some forgotten chance when I was young Had once a glimmering window overhung With honeysuckle wet with evening dew.

Along the path tall dusky dahlias grew, And shadowy hydrangeas reached and swung Ferociously; and over me, among The moths and mysteries, a blurred bat flew.

Somewhere within there were dim presences Of days that hovered and of years gone by.

I waited, and between their silences There was an evanescent faded noise; And though a child, I knew it was the voice Of one whose occupation was to die.

Discovery

We told of him as one who should have soared And seen for us the devastating light Whereof there is not either day or night, And shared with us the glamour of the Word That fell once upon Amos to record For men at ease in Zion, when the sight Of ills obscured aggrieved him and the might Of Hamath was a warning of the Lord.

a.s.sured somehow that he would make us wise, Our pleasure was to wait; and our surprise Was hard when we confessed the dry return Of his regret. For we were still to learn That earth has not a school where we may go For wisdom, or for more than we may know.

Firelight

Ten years together without yet a cloud, They seek each other's eyes at intervals Of gratefulness to firelight and four walls For love's obliteration of the crowd.

Serenely and perennially endowed And bowered as few may be, their joy recalls No snake, no sword; and over them there falls The blessing of what neither says aloud.

Wiser for silence, they were not so glad Were she to read the graven tale of lines On the wan face of one somewhere alone; Nor were they more content could he have had Her thoughts a moment since of one who s.h.i.+nes Apart, and would be hers if he had known.

The New Tenants

The day was here when it was his to know How fared the barriers he had built between His triumph and his enemies unseen, For them to undermine and overthrow; And it was his no longer to forego The sight of them, insidious and serene, Where they were delving always and had been Left always to be vicious and to grow.

And there were the new tenants who had come, By doors that were left open unawares, Into his house, and were so much at home There now that he would hardly have to guess, By the slow guile of their vindictiveness, What ultimate insolence would soon be theirs.

Inferential

Although I saw before me there the face Of one whom I had honored among men The least, and on regarding him again Would not have had him in another place, He fitted with an unfamiliar grace The coffin where I could not see him then As I had seen him and appraised him when I deemed him unessential to the race.

For there was more of him than what I saw.

And there was on me more than the old awe That is the common genius of the dead.

I might as well have heard him: "Never mind; If some of us were not so far behind, The rest of us were not so far ahead."

The Rat

As often as he let himself be seen We pitied him, or scorned him, or deplored The inscrutable profusion of the Lord Who shaped as one of us a thing so mean -- Who made him human when he might have been A rat, and so been wholly in accord With any other creature we abhorred As always useless and not always clean.

Now he is hiding all alone somewhere, And in a final hole not ready then; For now he is among those over there Who are not coming back to us again.

And we who do the fiction of our share Say less of rats and rather more of men.

Rahel to Varnhagen

Note. -- Rahel Robert and Varnhagen von Ense were married, after many protestations on her part, in 1814. The marriage -- so far as he was concerned, at any rate -- appears to have been satisfactory.