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| LADY ANNE DEWHURST on a crimson couch | |
| Lay, with a rug of sable o’er her knees, | |
| In a bright boudoir in Belgravia; | |
| Most perfectly array’d in shapely robe | |
| Of sumptuous satin, lit up here and there | 5 |
| With scarlet touches, and with costly lace, | |
| Nice-finger’d maidens knotted in Brabant; | |
| And all around her spread magnificence | |
| Of bronzes, Sévres vases, marquetrie, | |
| Rare buhl, and bric-à-brac of every kind, | 10 |
| From Rome and Paris and the centuries | |
| Of far-off beauty. All of goodly color, | |
| Or graceful form that could delight the eye, | |
| In orderly disorder lay around, | |
| And flowers with perfume scented the warm air. | 15 |
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| Stately and large and beautiful was she | |
| Spite of her sixty summers, with an eye | |
| Train’d to soft languors, that could also flash, | |
| Keen as a sword and sharp—a black bright eye, | |
| Deep sunk beneath an arch of jet. She had | 20 |
| A weary look, and yet the weariness | |
| Seem’d not so native as the worldliness | |
| Which blended with it. Weary and worldly, she | |
| Had quite resign’d herself to misery | |
| In this sad vale of tears, but fully meant | 25 |
| to nurse her sorrow in a sumptuous fashion, | |
| And make it an expensive luxury; | |
| For nothing she esteem’d that nothing cost. | |
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| Beside her, on a table round, inlaid | |
| With precious stones by Roman art design’d, | 30 |
| Lay phials, scent, a novel and a Bible, | |
| A pill box, and a wine glass, and a book | |
| On the Apocalypse; for she was much | |
| Addicted unto physic and religion, | |
| And her physician had prescrib’d for her | 35 |
| Jellies and wines and cheerful Literature. | |
| The Book on the Apocalypse was writ | |
| By her chosen pastor, and she took the novel | |
| With the dry sherry, and the pills prescrib’d. | |
| A gorgeous, pious, comfortable life | 40 |
| Of misery she lived; and all the sins | |
| Of all her house, and all the nation’s sins, | |
| And all shortcomings of the Church and State, | |
| And all the sins of all the world beside, | |
| Bore as her special cross, confessing them | 45 |
| Vicariously day by day, and then | |
| She comforted her heart, which needed it, | |
| With bric-à-brac and jelly and old wine. | |
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| Beside the fire, her elbow on the mantel, | |
| And forehead resting on her finger-tips, | 50 |
| Shading a face where sometimes loom’d a frown, | |
| And sometimes flash’d a gleam of bitter scorn, | |
| Her daughter stood; no more a graceful girl, | |
| But in the glory of her womanhood, | |
| Stately and haughty. One who might have been | 55 |
| A noble woman in a nobler world, | |
| But now was only woman of her world; | |
| With just enough of better thought to know | |
| It was not noble, and despise it all, | |
| And most herself for making it her all. | 60 |
| A woman, complex, intricate, involv’d; | |
| Wrestling with self, yet still by self subdued; | |
| Scorning herself for being what she was, | |
| And yet unable to be that she would; | |
| Uneasy with the sense of possible good | 65 |
| Never attain’d, nor sought, except in fits | |
| Ending in failures; conscious, too, of power | |
| Which found no purpose to direct its force, | |
| And so came back upon herself, and grew | |
| An inward fret. The caged bird sometimes dash’d | 70 |
| Against the wires, and sometimes sat and pin’d, | |
| But mainly peck’d her sugar, and eyed her glass, | |
| And trill’d her graver thoughts away in song. | |
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| Mother and daughter—yet a childless mother, | |
| And motherless her daughter; for the world | 75 |
| Had gash’d a chasm between, impassable, | |
| And they had nought in common, neither love, | |
| Nor hate, nor anything except a name. | |
| Yet both were of the world; and she not least | |
| Whose world was the religious one, and stretch’d | 80 |
| A kind of isthmus ’tween the Devil and God, | |
| A slimy, oozy mud, where mandrakes grew, | |
| Ghastly, with intertwisted roots, and things | |
| Amphibious haunted, and the leathern bat | |
| Flicker’d about its twilight evermore. | 85 |
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