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Home  »  Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century  »  Jane Barlow (1857–1917)

Alfred H. Miles, ed. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.

By Ghost-Bereft (1901). II. The Turn of the Road

Jane Barlow (1857–1917)

Deceptaque non capiatur.

WHERE this narrow lane slips by,

All the land’s breadth, over-glowed

Under amplest arching sky,

Seems a secret meet to keep

For these hedged banks close and high,

Till the turn of the road.

Then a curve of sudden sweep—

Lone and green the country side,

Like a cloak, with scarce a fold,

And the white track’s dwindling thread,

Lies in basking beams dispread:

You may look out far and wide

From the turn of the road.

There’s a gleam of rusted gold,

And a blink of eave-stained wall,

Up the lane a rood or so,

Where a thatched roof huddles low;

And a day will seldom fall

But its mistress, bent and old,

Rime-frost hair and little red shawl,

Through her black-gapped doorway fares.

Very frail and meagre and small,

And the years’ unlifted load

With a faltering foot she bears

’Twixt the tall banks to and fro;

But her steps will ever stay

Ere the turn of the road—

Never reach it; you might guess

That they halt for feebleness,

Till you hear her story told.

For she says: “The children all

Are a weary while away.

Years long since I watched them go—

’Twas when dawn came glimmering cold-

Round the turn of the road.

And I’m lonesome left behind;

Yet time passes, fast or slow,

And they’re coming home some day;

They’ll come back to me, they said:

Just this morn that’s overhead

It might chance, for aught I know.

“And that’s always in my mind,

For I dream it in my sleep,

And I think it when I wake,

And when out of doors I creep

Towards the turn of the road,

Then a step I hardly make

But I’m saying all the while,

Ere another minute’s gone

I may see them there, all three,

Coming home, poor lads, to me,

Round the turn of the road.

“But a stone’s throw further on,

If I’d creep to where it showed

Like a riband stretched a mile,

And the longest look I’d take

Saw naught stirring on its white,

Sure my heart were fit to break.

“So or ever I come in sight,

Home I set my face again,

Lest I’d lose the thought that’s light

Through the darksome day. And then

If I find the house so still

That my heart begins to ache,

And a hundred harms forebode,

Ere my foot is o’er the sill,

I can think I needn’t fret,

If they’re maybe near me yet

At the turn of the road.”