Entering your house, I sniff again
the Free Church air, the pictures on the wall
of ministers in collars, all these dull
acres of brown paint, the chairs half seen
in dim sad corners by the sacred hall
under the spread antlers of that head
mildly gazing above leathern tomes.
So many draperies in so many rooms.
So many coverlets on each heavy bed.
A stagnant green perpetuates these glooms.
And then the stairs. The ancient lamps and the
scent of old prayers, texts of ‘God is Love’.
Did any children grow through all this grief?
The ceilings seem to sigh, the floor to be
carpeted by a threadbare dim belief.
Such pressures on the head. And then I see
in an oval frame an eighteen-year-old girl
like Emily Brontë staring from the peril
of commandments breaking round her. And I pray
that she was happy, curl on winding curl,
even though I see the stains around her face,
the ancient tints of brown that eat at brow
and hair and nose, and make me see her now
as almost rusted in this world of grace.
How little beauty conscious sins allow!
I enter the great garden with its red
and dripping roses, laburnums and the tall
tulips and the columbines, the small
and holy Rose of Sharon. All the dead
are lost in colour as the dewdrops fall.
I watch a bee nuzzling from tower to tower
of brilliant yellow, each with soundless bell,
its hairy body busy in the smell
and light of evening. From flower to flower
it flies and sucks, quivers, then is still,
so gross and purposeful I can forget
the tall and simple flowers it feeds on here
in this bright garden of a freer air.
pray that she, some gross and fruitful night,
under less heavy coverlets as bare
as these tall flowers, allowed new life to start
from her body’s honey, turning to the wall
that portrait of her father, stern and tall.
And that the Rose of Sharon at her heart
quivered and quietened in her radiant fall.