REUBEN
For here, amid the garden and the downs,
Their still and simple life of well-loved toil,
Toil that was life, and daily sweetness small,
Reuben and Mercy led: a childless pair,
Through forty years of mutual tenderness
Each to the other child and parent grown.
She was a little woman, shrivell’d, spare
And apt, with beaming eyes and rosy cheeks
And busy birdlike movements. I have thought,
At times, the life they led, and he required,
Solitary, same, pressed hard on Mercy. Hers
Was a keen taste in little things; she loved
That trivial, intimate, long-drawn-out talk
Of daily happenings, in-and-out details,
And chance of new-old changes, by whose help
Women in villages make shift to weave
Some kind of colour’d arabesque as fringe
To Life’s web, hodden-gray. But seldom hers
Such brightening; only of a Sunday morn,
The greetings after church—he standing back
Uneasy: or a spice of gossip to
Some rare event of shopping—when the thought
Of him there all alone wing’d her way back.
Yet she was happy. Love was Life, to her,
And all her life was love. Like some small brook
Was Mercy, that, from meadows turn’d aside,
Runs brightly in a bare place, buoyantly
Babbling and dancing ’mid a fringe of flowers
Itself has brought to birth: with no cascade
Resplendent, and by no deep following pool
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