William Howells - Poems

I know they won the faint perfume,
That to their faded pages clings,
From gloves, and handkerchiefs, and things
Kept in the soft and scented gloom

Of some mysterious box–poor leaves
Of summer, now as sere and dead
As any leaves of summer shed
From crimson boughs when autumn grieves!

The ghost of fragrance! Yet I thrill
All through with such delicious pain
Of soul and sense, to breathe again
The sweet that haunted memory still.

And under these December skies,
As bland as May’s in other climes,
I move, and muse my idle rhymes
And subtly sentimentalize.

I hear the music that was played,–
The songs that silence knows by heart!–
I see sweet burlesque feigning art,
The careless grace that curved and swayed

Through dances and through breezy walks;
I feel once more the eyes that smiled,
And that dear presence that beguiled
The pauses of the foolish talks,

When this poor phantom of perfume
Was the Sweet Clover’s living soul,
And breathed from her as if it stole,
Ah, heaven! from her heart in bloom!

We have not many ways with pain:
We weep weak tears, or else we laugh;
I doubt, not less the cup we quaff,
And tears and scorn alike are vain.

But let me live my quiet life;
I will not vex my calm with grief,
I only know the pang was brief,
And there an end of hope and strife.

And thou? I put the letters by:
In years the sweetness shall not pass;
More than the perfect blossom was
I count its lingering memory.

Alas! with Time dear Love is dead,
And not with Fate. And who can guess
How weary of our happiness
We might have been if we were wed?

Confronting each other the pictures stare
Into each other’s sleepless eyes;
And the daylight into the darkness dies,
From year to year in the palace there:
But they watch and guard that no device
Take either one of them unaware.

Their majesties the king and the queen,
The parents of the reigning prince:
Both put off royalty many years since,
With life and the gifts that have always been
Given to kings from God, to evince
His sense of the mighty over the mean.

I cannot say that I like the face
Of the king; it is something fat and red;
And the neck that lifts the royal head
Is thick and coarse; and a scanty grace
Dwells in the dull blue eyes that are laid
Sullenly on the queen in her place.

He must have been a king in his day
’Twere well to pleasure in work and sport:
One of the heaven-anointed sort
Who ruled his people with iron sway,
And knew that, through good and evil report,
God meant him to rule and them to obey.

There are many other likenesses
Of the king in his royal palace there;
You find him depicted everywhere,–
In his robes of state, in his hunting-dress,
In his flowing wig, in his powdered hair,–
A king in all of them, none the less;

But most himself in this on the wall
Over against his consort, whose
Laces, and hoops, and high-heeled shoes
Make her the finest lady of all
The queens or courtly dames you choose,
In the ancestral portrait hall.

A glorious blonde: a luxury
Of luring blue and wanton gold,
Of blanchéd rose and crimson bold,
Of lines that flow voluptuously
In tender, languorous curves to fold
Her form in perfect symmetry.

She might have been false. Of her withered dust
There scarcely would be enough to write
Her guilt in now; and the dead have a right
To our lenient doubt if not to our trust:
So if the truth cannot make her white,
Let us be as merciful as we–must.

The queen died first, the queen died young,
But the king was very old when he died,
Rotten with license, and lust, and pride;
And the usual Virtues came and hung
Their cypress wreaths on his tomb, and wide
Throughout his kingdom his praise was sung.

How the queen died is not certainly known,
And faithful subjects are all forbid
To speak of the murder which some one did
One night while she slept in the dark alone:
History keeps the story hid,
And Fear only tells it in undertone.

Up from your startled feet aloof,
In the famous Echo-Room, with a bound
Leaps the echo, and round and round
Beating itself against the roof,–
A horrible, gasping, shuddering sound,–
Dies ere its terror can utter proof

Of that it knows. A door is fast,
And none is suffered to enter there.
His sacred majesty could not bear
To look at it toward the last,
As he grew very old. It opened where
The queen died young so many years past.

How the queen died is not certainly known;
But in the palace’s solitude
A harking dread and horror brood,
And a silence, as if a mortal groan
Had been hushed the moment before, and would
Break forth again when you were gone.

The present king has never dwelt
In the desolate palace. From year to year
In the wide and stately garden drear
The snows and the snowy blossoms melt
Unheeded, and a ghastly fear
Through all the shivering leaves is felt.

By night the gathering shadows creep
Along the dusk and hollow halls,
And the slumber-broken palace calls
With stifled moans from its nightmare sleep;
And then the ghostly moonlight falls
Athwart the darkness brown and deep.

At early dawn the light wind sighs,
And through the desert garden blows
The wasted sweetness of the rose;