Read By Moonlight

I PAUSED to read a letter of hers By the moon’s cold shine, Eyeing it in the tenderest way, And edging it up to catch each ray Upon her light-penned line. I did not know what years would flow Of her life’s span and mine Ere I read another letter of hers By the moon’s cold shine!

I chance now on the last of hers, By the moon’s cold shine; It is the one remaining page Out of the many shallow and sage Whereto she set her sign. Who could foresee there were to be Such letters of pain and pine Ere I should read this last of hers By the moon’s cold shine!

AT A HOUSE IN HAMPSTEAD SOMETIME THE DWELLING OF JOHN KEATS

O POET, come you haunting here Where streets have stolen up all around, And never a nightingale pours one Full-throated sound?

Drawn from your drowse by the Seven famed Hills, Thought you to find all just the same Here shining, as in hours of old, If you but came?

What will you do in your surprise At seeing that changes wrought in Rome Are wrought yet more on the misty slope One time your home?

Will you wake wind-wafts on these stairs? Swing the doors open noisily? Show as an umbraged ghost beside Your ancient tree?

Or will you, softening, the while You further and yet further look, Learn that a laggard few would fain Preserve your nook? . . .

—Where the Piazza steps incline, And catch late light at eventide, I once stood, in that Rome, and thought, “’Twas here he died.”

I drew to a violet-sprinkled spot, Where day and night a pyramid keeps Uplifted its white hand, and said, “’Tis there he sleeps.”

Pleasanter now it is to hold That here, where sang he, more of him Remains than where he, tuneless, cold, Passed to the dim.

July 1920.