| |
| | “A note |
| All out of tune in this world’s instrument.” |
| —AMY LEVY. |
I KNOW not in what fashion she was made, | |
| Nor what her voice was, when she used to speak, | |
| Nor if the silken lashes threw a shade | |
| On wan or rosy cheek. | |
| |
| I picture her with sorrowful vague eyes | 5 |
| Illumed with such strange gleams of inner light | |
| As linger in the drift of London skies | |
| Ere twilight turns to night. | |
| |
| I know not; I conjecture. ’T was a girl | |
| That with her own most gentle desperate hand | 10 |
| From out God’s mystic setting plucked life’s pearl— | |
| ’T is hard to understand. | |
| |
| So precious life is! Even to the old | |
| The hours are as a miser’s coins, and she— | |
| Within her hands lay youth’s unminted gold | 15 |
| And all felicity. | |
| |
| The winged impetuous spirit, the white flame | |
| That was her soul once, whither has it flown? | |
| Above her brow gray lichens blot her name | |
| Upon the carven stone. | 20 |
| |
| This is her Book of Verses—wren-like notes, | |
| Shy franknesses, blind gropings, haunting fears; | |
| At times across the chords abruptly floats | |
| A mist of passionate tears. | |
| |
| A fragile lyre too tensely keyed and strung, | 25 |
| A broken music, weirdly incomplete: | |
| Here a proud mind, self-baffled and self-stung, | |
| Lies coiled in dark defeat. | |
| |
