Young Love XIV - A June Lily

[The poet dramatises his Lady's loneliness]     Alone! once more alone! how like a tomb     My little parlour sounds which only now     Yearned like some holy chancel with his voice.     So still! so empty! Surely one might fear     The walls should meet in ruinous collapse     That held no more his music. Yet they stand     Firm in a foolish firmness, meaningless     As frescoed sepulchre some Pharaoh built     But never came to sleep in; built, indeed,     For - that grey moth to flit in like a ghost!     Alone! another feast-day come and gone,     Watched through the weeks as in my garden there     I watch a seedling grow from blade to bud     Impatient for its blossom. So this day     Has bloomed at last, and we have plucked its flower     And shared its sweetness, and once more the time     Is as that stalk from which but now I plucked     Its last June-lily as a parting sign.     Yea, but he seemed to love it! yet if he     But craved it in deceit of tenderness     To make my heart glow brighter with a lie!     Will it indeed be cherished as he said,     Or will he keep it near his book a while,     And when grown rank forget it in his glass,     And leave it for the maid who dusts his room     To clear away and cast upon the heap?     Or, may be, will he bury it away     In some old drawer with other mummy-flowers?     Nay, but I wrong thee, dear one, thinking so.     My boy, my love, my poet! Nay, I know     Thy lonely room, tomb-like to thee as mine,     Tomb-like as tomb of some returning ghost     Seems only bright about my lily-flower.     And, mayhap, while I wrong thee thus in thought     Thou bendest o'er it, feigning for some ease     Of parted ache conceits of poet-wit     On petal and on stamen - let me try!     If lilies be alike thine is as this,     I wonder if thy reading tallies too.     Six petals with a dewdrop in their heart,     Six pure brave years, an ivory cup of tears;     Six pearly-pillared stamens golden-crowned     Growing from out the dewdrop, and a seventh     Soaring alone trilobed and mystic green;     Six pearl-bright years aflower with gold of joy,     Sprung from the heart of those brave tear-fed years:     But what that seventh single stamen is     My little wit must leave for thee to tell.     But neither poet nor a sibyl thou!     What brave conceit had he, my poet, built;     No jugglery of numbers that mean nought,     That can mean nought for ever, unto us.