How pretty it looks, thought a passer-by –
That cyclamen on her windowsill:
Flowers flushed like the butterfly kisses of sleep that illumine
A child’s alabaster cheek.
She who set it there must have warm hopes to bloom in,
So happy it looks, thought the passer-by,
On the newcomer’s windowsill.
O passer-by, can you not feel my glances
Beating against the pane,
Fluttering like a moth shut off from the glades of musk
And the moonlit dances?
O passer-by, can you not see it plain?
She comes not to meet us, muttered the neighbours
Peering in from the stony street:
But look at her parlour, all lighted and spider-spruce!
How saucily wink the brasses!
So garnished a room never tokens a pure recluse.
Let us hope she’ll bring, said the gossiping neighbours,
No scandal upon our street.
Ah, what do you know of the crippled heart, my neighbours,
That shrinks from the light and the press?
My winking brass, all the fine repetitive web
Of my house-proud labours –
Even I dare not know them for signals of distress.
A happy release, murmured the living
As they carried at last out into the world
Her body, light as a bird’s that has died of hunger
Beneath some warped hedgerow:
Though it was her own doing if all humanity shunned her,
Yet a happy release to be done with living
An outcast from the world.
O living hearts, you are wrong once more. Unassuaged
Even now are my pangs, my fears.
I starved amid plenty. Death seemed no deliverance
To flesh that was caged,
O living hearts, in a ghost these fifty years.