| |
| IF a leaf rustled, she would start: | |
| And yet she died, a year ago. | |
| How had so frail a thing the heart | |
| To journey where she trembled so? | |
| And do they turn and turn in fright, | 5 |
| Those little feet, in so much night? | |
| |
| The light above the poet’s head | |
| Streamed on the page and on the cloth, | |
| And twice and thrice there buffeted | |
| On the black pane a white-winged moth: | 10 |
| ’T was Annie’s soul that beat outside | |
| And “Open, open, open!” cried: | |
| |
| “I could not find the way to God; | |
| There were too many flaming suns | |
| For signposts, and the fearful road | 15 |
| Led over wastes where millions | |
| Of tangled comets hissed and burned— | |
| I was bewildered and I turned. | |
| |
| “O, it was easy then! I knew | |
| Your window and no star beside. | 20 |
| Look up, and take me back to you!” | |
| —He rose and thrust the window wide. | |
| ’T was but because his brain was hot | |
| With rhyming; for he heard her not. | |
| |
| But poets polishing a phrase | 25 |
| Show anger over trivial things; | |
| And as she blundered in the blaze | |
| Towards him, on ecstatic wings, | |
| He raised a hand and smote her dead; | |
| Then wrote “That I had died instead!” | 30 |
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