As catching up to-day and yesterday
In a perfect chord of love; and so, Mark Gage,
I envy you your mother!—and you, Graham,
Because you have a wife who loves you so,
She half forgets, at moments, to be proud
Of being Graham’s wife, until a friend observes,
‘The boy here, has his father’s massive brow,
Done small in wax . . if we push back the curls.’
Who loves me? Dearest father,—mother sweet,—
I speak the names out sometimes by myself,
And make the silence shiver: they sound strange,
As Hindostanee to an Ind-born man
Accustomed many years to English speech;
Or lovely poet-words grown obsolete,
Which will not leave off singing. Up in heaven
I have my father,—with my mother’s face
Beside him in a blotch of heavenly light;
No more for earth’s familiar household use,
No more! The best verse written by this hand,
Can never reach them where they sit, to seem
Well-done to them. Death quite unfellows us,
Sets dreadful odds betwixt the live and dead,
And makes us part as those at Babel did,
Through sudden ignorance of a common tongue.
A living Cæsar would not dare to play
At bowls, with such as my dead father is.
And yet, this may be less so than appears,
This change and separation. Sparrows five
