What does she think of, hour by hour,
With her strange eyes bent on the distant west,
And a fresh white rose on her withered breast,
What does she think of, hour by hour?
The Lady Cecile.

Low under the lattice, day by day,
White homeward sails like swallows come,
But the sad eyes look afar and away,
And the sailors' songs as they near their home,
No glance may win, for she sitteth dumb,
With her sad eyes looking afar and away,
The Lady Cecile.

Just forty years has she dwelt alone
With an ancient servant, grim and gray,
Sat alone under sun and moon;
But once each year, on the third of June,
She treads the creaking staircase down,
But back in her tower with the dying day,
Is the Lady Cecile.

Beneath the tower of the lonesome hall,
Stone stairs creep down where the slow tide flows,
There, out of a niche in the mouldering wall,
Low leaneth a royal tropical rose:
Who set it there none cares, nor knows,
Long years ago in the mouldering wall,
But the Lady Cecile.