At The Dinner-Table

I sat at dinner in my prime,     And glimpsed my face in the sideboard-glass,     And started as if I had seen a crime,     And prayed the ghastly show might pass.     Wrenched wrinkled features met my sight,     Grinning back to me as my own;     I well-nigh fainted with affright     At finding me a haggard crone.     My husband laughed. He had slily set     A warping mirror there, in whim     To startle me. My eyes grew wet;     I spoke not all the eve to him.     He was sorry, he said, for what he had done,     And took away the distorting glass,     Uncovering the accustomed one;     And so it ended? No, alas,     Fifty years later, when he died,     I sat me in the selfsame chair,     Thinking of him. Till, weary-eyed,     I saw the sideboard facing there;     And from its mirror looked the lean     Thing I'd become, each wrinkle and score     The image of me that I had seen     In jest there fifty years before.