Two Ways of Love.
54
Of highest chivalry that ever drove
An honourable and romantic youth
To fling his life quixotically away,
That you had volunteered to marry me,
To shield me from exposure, and across
The naked, shivering spectre of my life
Throw as a cloak your warm and sheltering name.
And, dazed and helpless, stricken with despair,
A graven image of sheer misery,
And aged just seventeen! I married you
At her command. Oh, Heaven! what a farce,
A bride whose heart was dead before it lived.
Whose brain was seared. Oh, Tom! Oh! generous heart!
What fatal instinct made you lend yourself
To such a plan, so futile, and so wrong,
As if an empty marriage could atone!
As if two wrongs could ever make a right.
A marriage—that! when scarcely had the words
Been uttered than we parted, you and I,
And, for long years were never face to face.
For we, my frozen Mother and myself,
Wandered in foreign countries year on year,
An honourable and romantic youth
To fling his life quixotically away,
That you had volunteered to marry me,
To shield me from exposure, and across
The naked, shivering spectre of my life
Throw as a cloak your warm and sheltering name.
And, dazed and helpless, stricken with despair,
A graven image of sheer misery,
And aged just seventeen! I married you
At her command. Oh, Heaven! what a farce,
A bride whose heart was dead before it lived.
Whose brain was seared. Oh, Tom! Oh! generous heart!
What fatal instinct made you lend yourself
To such a plan, so futile, and so wrong,
As if an empty marriage could atone!
As if two wrongs could ever make a right.
A marriage—that! when scarcely had the words
Been uttered than we parted, you and I,
And, for long years were never face to face.
For we, my frozen Mother and myself,
Wandered in foreign countries year on year,
