The Going

Why did you give no hint that night     That quickly after the morrow's dawn,     And calmly, as if indifferent quite,     You would close your term here, up and be gone         Where I could not follow         With wing of swallow     To gain one glimpse of you ever anon!         Never to bid good-bye,         Or give me the softest call,     Or utter a wish for a word, while I     Saw morning harden upon the wall,         Unmoved, unknowing         That your great going     Had place that moment, and altered all.     Why do you make me leave the house     And think for a breath it is you I see     At the end of the alley of bending boughs     Where so often at dusk you used to be;         Till in darkening dankness         The yawning blankness     Of the perspective sickens me!         You were she who abode         By those red-veined rocks far West,     You were the swan-necked one who rode     Along the beetling Beeny Crest,         And, reining nigh me,         Would muse and eye me,     While Life unrolled us its very best.     Why, then, latterly did we not speak,     Did we not think of those days long dead,     And ere your vanishing strive to seek     That time's renewal? We might have said,         "In this bright spring weather         We'll visit together     Those places that once we visited."         Well, well! All's past amend,         Unchangeable. It must go.     I seem but a dead man held on end     To sink down soon . . . O you could not know         That such swift fleeing         No soul foreseeing -     Not even I would undo me so!     December 1912.