Childhood Friends
"My love is my life, my all upon earth,
And yours but the warmth of the home-cheering hearth,
Where you'll shiver soon at the weaning blaze.
I should have stayed on in my springtime days.
We must not be bound by riveted links
Till each hates the other, and moans and shrinks.
I beg you forget me. I close my breast
And only long for the sleep of the grave.
But I know that my spirit is still possessed
Of a chain that holds you at my behest
With the memory-links that our springtime gave,
Which are set with jewels of deeper glow
Than love with its gleam as from hell below.
Whenever you seek to give to another
The ring that now from my hand is warm,
You will stand there pale, your eyes you will cover,
Then stunned and waking you'll check your arm.
Between two eternities we have met—
And we part—That you're gone I may think sincerely;
But it's only an error, illusion merely.
The brooding man holds his compasses yet
On the circle in which his thoughts are bound
And like wolves go anxiously round and round;
Great men of the day, a contented set,
In street-corner conference go and come;
New friends at his heart are knocking there
And guests tramp up the snow-covered stair
To be welcomed by him on the porch of his home—
And yours but the warmth of the home-cheering hearth,
Where you'll shiver soon at the weaning blaze.
I should have stayed on in my springtime days.
We must not be bound by riveted links
Till each hates the other, and moans and shrinks.
I beg you forget me. I close my breast
And only long for the sleep of the grave.
But I know that my spirit is still possessed
Of a chain that holds you at my behest
With the memory-links that our springtime gave,
Which are set with jewels of deeper glow
Than love with its gleam as from hell below.
Whenever you seek to give to another
The ring that now from my hand is warm,
You will stand there pale, your eyes you will cover,
Then stunned and waking you'll check your arm.
Between two eternities we have met—
And we part—That you're gone I may think sincerely;
But it's only an error, illusion merely.
The brooding man holds his compasses yet
On the circle in which his thoughts are bound
And like wolves go anxiously round and round;
Great men of the day, a contented set,
In street-corner conference go and come;
New friends at his heart are knocking there
And guests tramp up the snow-covered stair
To be welcomed by him on the porch of his home—
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