He never Expected Much

A Consideration [A Reflection] on my Eighty-sixth Birthday

WELL, World, you have kept faith with me

Kept faith with me ;

Upon the whole you have proved to be

Much as you said you were.

Since as a child I used to lie

Upon the leaze and watch the sky,

Never, I own, expected I

That life would all be fair.

'Twas then you said, and since have said,

Times since have said,

In that mysterious voice you shed

From clouds and hills around:

"Many have loved me desperately,

Many with smooth serenity,

While some have shown contempt of me

Till they dropped underground.

"I do not promise overmuch,

Child; overmuch;

Just neutral-tinted haps and such,"

You said to minds like mine.

Wise warning for your credit's sake!

Which I for one failed not to take,

And hence could stem such strain and ache

As each year might assign.

A SHEEP FAIR

The day arrives of the autumn fair,

And torrents fall,

Though sheep in throngs are gathered there,

Ten thousand all,

Sodden, with hurdles around them reared:

And, lot by lot, the pens are cleared,

And the auctioneer wrings out his beard,

And wipes his book, bedrenched and smeared,

Anf rakes the rain from his face with the edge of his hand,

And torrents fall.

The wool of the ewes is like a sponge

With the daylong rain:

Jammed tight, to turn, or lie, or lunge,

They strive in vain.

Their horns are soft as finger-nails,

Their shepherds reek against the rails,

The tied dogs soak with tucked-in tails,

The buyers' hat-brims fill like pails,

Which spill small cascades when they shift their stand

In the daylong rain.

POSTSCRIPT

Time has trailed lengthily since met

At Pummery Fair

Those panting thousands in their wet

And woolly wear:

And every flock long since has bled,

And all the dripping buyers have sped,

And the hoarse auctioneer is dead,

Who 'Going - going!' so often said,

As he consigned to doom each meek, mewed band

At Pummery Fair.

SNOW IN THE SUBURBS

Every branch big with it,

Bent every twig with it;

Every fork like a white web-foot;

Every street and pavement mute:

Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward when

Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.

The palings are glued together like a wall,

And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.

A sparrow enters the tree,

Whereon immediately

A snow-lump thrice his own slight size

Descends on him and showers his head and eye

And overturns him,

And near inurns him,

And lights on a nether twig, when its brush

Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.

The steps are a blanched slope,

Up which, with feeble hope,

A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;

And we take him in.

A Light Snow-Fall after Frost

On the flat road a man at last appears:

How much his whitening hairs

Owe to the settling snow's mute anchorage,

And how much to a life's rough pilgrimage,

One cannot certify.

The frost is on the wane,

And cobwebs hanging close outside the pane

Pose as festoons of thick white worsted there,

Of their pale presence no eye being aware

Till the rime made them plain.

A second man comes by;

His ruddy beard brings fire to the pallid scene:

His coat is faded green;

Hence seems it that his mien

Wears something of the dye

Of the berried holm-trees that he passes nigh.

The snow-feathers so gently swoop that though

But half an hour ago

The road was brown, and now is starkly white,

A watcher would have failed defining quite

When it transformed it so.

What have you looked at, Moon,

In your time,

Now long past your prime?

Oh, I have looked at, often looked at

Sweet sublime, saw things shudderful,

Night and noon, in my time.

What have you mused on Moon,

In your day,

So aloof, so far away?

Oh, I have mused on, Often mused on

Growth, decay,

Nations alive, dead, mad, aswoon,

In my day.

Have you much wondered, Moon,

On your rounds,

Self-wrapped, beyond Earth’s bounds?

Oh, I have wondered, often wondered,

At the sounds reaching me

Of the human tune,

On my rounds.

What do you think of it, Moon,

As you go?

Is life much, or no?

Oh, I think of it, often think of it,

As a show

God ought surely to shut up soon,

As I go.