The sad, gemmed crucifix and incense blue
Is childhood once again. Her memory
Is like an ant-hill which a twig disturbs,
But twig stilled never. And to see her face,
Broad with sleek homely beams; her babied hands,
Ever like 'lighting doves, and her small eyes--
Blue wells a-twinkle, arch and lewd and pious--
To darken all sudden into Stygian gloom,
And paint disaster with uplifted whites,
Is life's epitome. She prates and prates--
A waterbrook of words o'er twelve small pebbles.
And when she dies--some grey, long, summer evening,
When the bird shouts of childhood through the dusk,
'Neath night's faint tapers--then her body shall
Lie stiff with silks of sixty thrifty years.




IAGO


A dark lean face, a narrow, slanting eye,
Whose deeps of blackness one pale taper's beam
Haunts with a fitting madness of desire;
A heart whose cinder at the breath of passion
Glows to a momentary core of heat
Almost beyond indifference to endure:
So parched Iago frets his life away.
His scorn works ever in a brain whose wit