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Title: Old Fairingdown
Author: Olive Tilford Dargan [
More Titles by Dargan]
Soft as a treader on mosses
I go through the village that sleeps;
The village too early abed,
For the night still shuffles, a gipsy,
In the woods of the east,
And the west remembers the sun.
Not all are asleep; there are faces
That lean from the walls of the gardens;
Look sharply, or you will not see them,
Or think them another stone in the wall.
I spoke to a stone, and it answered
Like an aged rock that crumbles;
Each falling piece was a word.
"Five have I buried," it said,
"And seven are over the sea."
Here is a hut that I pass,
So lowly it has no brow,
And dwarfs sit within at a table.
A boy waits apart by the hearth;
On his face the patience of firelight,
But his eyes seek the door and a far world.
It is not the call to the table he waits,
But the call of the sea-rimmed forests,
And cities that stir in a dream.
I haste by the low-browed door,
Lest my arms go in and betray me,
A mother jealously passing.
He will go, the pale dwarf, and walk tall among giants;
The child with his eyes on the far land,
And fame like a young, curled leaf in his heart.
The stream that darts from the hanging hill
Like a silver wing that must sing as it flies,
Is folded and still on the breast
Of the village that sleeps.
Each mute, old house is more old than the other,
And each wears its vines like ragged hair
Round the half-blind windows.
If a child should laugh, if a girl should sing,
Would the houses rub the vines from their eyes,
And listen and live?
A voice comes now from a cottage,
A voice that is young and must sing,
A honeyed stab on the air,
And the houses do not wake.
I look through the leaf-blowzed window,
And start as a gazer who, passing a death-vault,
Sees life sitting hopeful within.
She is young, but a woman, round-breasted,
Waiting the peril of Eve;
And she makes the shadows about her sweet
As the glooms that play in a pine-wood.
She sits at a harpsichord (old as the walls are),
And longing flows in the trickling, fairy notes
Like a hidden brook in a forest
Seeking and seeking the sun.
I have watched a young tree on the edge of a wood
When the mist is weaving and drifting.
Slowly the boughs disappear and the leaves reach out
Like the drowning hands of children,
Till a grey blur quivers cold
Where the green grace drank of the sun.
So now, as I gaze, the morrows
Creep weaving and winding their mist
Round the beauty of her who sings.
They hide the soft rings of her hair,
Dear as a child's curling fingers;
They shut out the trembling sun of eyes
That are deep as a bending mother's;
And her bridal body is scarfed with their chill.
For old and old is the story;
Over and over I listen to murmurs
That are always the same in these towns that sleep;
Where grey and unwed a woman passes,
Her cramped, drab gown the bounds of a world
She holds with grief and silence;
And a gossip whose tongue alone is unwithered
Mumbles the tale by her affable gate;
How the lad must go, and the girl must stay,
Singing alone to the years and a dream;
Then a letter, a rumour, a word
From the land that reaches for lovers
And gives them not back;
And the maiden looks up with a face that is old;
Her smile, as her body, is evermore barren,
Her cheek like the bark of the beech-tree
Where climbs the grey winter.
Now have I seen her young,
The lone girl singing,
With the full round breast and the berry lip,
And heart that runs to a dawn-rise
On new-world mountains.
The weeping ash in the dooryard
Gathers the song in its boughs,
And the gown of dawn she will never wear.
I can listen no more; good-bye, little town, old Fairingdown.
I climb the long, dark hillside,
But the ache I have found here I cannot outclimb.
O Heart, if we had not heard, if we did not know
There is that in the village that never will sleep!
[The end]
Olive Tilford Dargan's poem: Old Fairingdown
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