| |
| SHE wore purple, and when other people slept | |
| She stept lightly—lightly—in her ruby powdered slippers | |
| Along the flags of the East portico. | |
| And the moon slowly rifting the heights of cloud | |
| Touched her face so that she bowed | 5 |
| Her head, and held her hand to her eyes | |
| To keep the white shining from her. And she was wise, | |
| For gazing at the moon was like looking on her own dead face | |
| Passing alone in a wide place, | |
| Chill and uncosseted, always above | 10 |
| The hot protuberance of life. Love to her | |
| Was morning and a great stir | |
| Of trumpets and tire-women and sharp sun. | |
| As she had begun, so she would end, | |
| Walking alone to the last bend | 15 |
| Where the portico turned the wall. | |
| And her slipper’s sound | |
| Was scarce as loud upon the ground | |
| As her tear’s fall. | |
| Her long white fingers crisped and clung | 20 |
| Each to each, and her weary tongue | |
| Rattled always the same cold speech: | |
| “Gold was not made to lie in grass, | |
| Silver dints at the touch of brass, | |
| The days pass.” | 25 |
| |
| Lightly, softly, wearily, | |
| The lady paces, drearily | |
| Listening to the half-shrill croon | |
| Leaves make on a moony Autumn night | |
| When the windy light | 30 |
| Runs over the ivy eerily. | |
| |
| A branch at the corner cocks an obscene eye | |
| As she passes—passes—by and by— | |
| A hand stretches out from a column’s edge, | |
| Faces float in a phosphorent wedge | 35 |
| Through the points of arches, and there is speech | |
| In the carven roof-groins out of reach. | |
| A love-word, a lust-word, shivers and mocks | |
| The placid stroke of the village clocks. | |
| Does the lady hear? | 40 |
| Is any one near? | |
| She jeers at life, must she wed instead | |
| The cold dead? | |
| A marriage-bed of moist green mould. | |
| With an over-head tester of beaten gold. | 45 |
| A splendid price for a splendid scorn, | |
| A tombstone pedigree snarled with thorn | |
| Clouding the letters and the fleur-de-lis, | |
| She will have them in granite for her heart’s chill ease. | |
| |
| I set the candle in a draught of air | 50 |
| And watched it swale to the last thin flare. | |
| They laid her in a fair chamber hung with arras, | |
| And they wept her virgin soul. | |
| The arras was woven of the story of Minos and Dictynna. | |
| But I grieved that I could no longer hear the shuffle of her feet along the portico, | 55 |
And the ruffling of her train against the stones.
The Dial | |
| |
