The Dawn After The Dance

Here is your parents' dwelling with its curtained windows telling     Of no thought of us within it or of our arrival here;     Their slumbers have been normal after one day more of formal     Matrimonial commonplace and household life's mechanic gear.     I would be candid willingly, but dawn draws on so chillingly     As to render further cheerlessness intolerable now,     So I will not stand endeavouring to declare a day for severing,     But will clasp you just as always - just the olden love avow.     Through serene and surly weather we have walked the ways together,     And this long night's dance this year's end eve now finishes the spell;     Yet we dreamt us but beginning a sweet sempiternal spinning     Of a cord we have spun to breaking - too intemperately, too well.     Yes; last night we danced I know, Dear, as we did that year ago, Dear,     When a new strange bond between our days was formed, and felt, and heard;     Would that dancing were the worst thing from the latest to the first thing     That the faded year can charge us with; but what avails a word!     That which makes man's love the lighter and the woman's burn no brighter     Came to pass with us inevitably while slipped the shortening year . . .     And there stands your father's dwelling with its blind bleak windows telling     That the vows of man and maid are frail as filmy gossamere.     WEYMOUTH, 1869.