She sits, the house drawn about her, so silently;
out in the street the lamp lights gleam.
She has been sitting still through the afternoon,
lost in a dream, in a waking dream.
Look at her hair, how it shines in the firelight:
once when her feet were wet with dew,
bare on the chilly green grasses of springtime,
wandering beneath where the wild briar blows,
she was as lithe as a deer in its running,
she was as trilling as slender streams.
Lightly she gamboled through sunlit meadows,
this lady now lost in dreams.
Bent is her head and how bowed her shoulders,
curved are her fingers like necks of swans.
Look in her eyes: you will feel much older.
She, with the visage of drawn-out stone,
once knew the paths through the thicketed forest
that led at the last to You-Know-Where.
One day grown old, she no longer remembered.
Look in her tattered eyes if you dare!