The Sprig Of Lime

He lay, and those who watched him were amazed     To see unheralded beneath the lids     Twin tears, new-gathered at the price of pain,     Start and at once run crookedly athwart     Cheeks channelled long by pain, never by tears.     So desolate too the sigh next uttered     They had wept also, but his great lips moved,     And bending down one heard, 'A sprig of lime;     Bring me a sprig of lime.' Whereat she stole     With dumb signs forth to pluck the thing he craved.     So lay he till a lime-twig had been snapped     From some still branch that swept the outer grass     Far from the silver pillar of the bole     Which mounting past the house's crusted roof     Split into massy limbs, crossed boughs, a maze     Of close-compacted intercontorted staffs     Bowered in foliage wherethrough the sun     Shot sudden showers of light or crystal spars     Or wavered in a green and vitreous flood.     And all the while in faint and fainter tones     Scarce audible on deepened evening's hush     He framed his curious and last request     For 'lime, a sprig of lime.' Her trembling hand     Closed his loose fingers on the awkward stem     Covered above with gentle heart-shaped leaves     And under dangling, pale as honey-wax,     Square clusters of sweet-scented starry flowers.     She laid his bent arm back upon his breast,     Then watched above white knuckles clenched in prayer.     He never moved. Only at last his eyes     Opened, then brightened in such avid gaze     She feared the coma mastered him again ...     But no; strange sobs rose chuckling in his throat,     A stranger ecstasy suffused the flesh     Of that just mask so sun-dried, gouged and old     Which few - too few! - had loved, too many feared.     'Father!' she cried; 'Father!'                          He did not hear.     She knelt and kneeling drank the scent of limes,     Blown round the slow blind by a vesperal gust,     Till the room swam. So the lime-incense blew     Into her life as once it had in his,     Though how and when and with what ageless charge     Of sorrow and deep joy how could she know?     Sweet lime that often at the height of noon     Diffusing dizzy fragrance from your boughs,     Tasselled with blossoms more innumerable     Than the black bees, the uproar of whose toil     Filled your green vaults, winning such metheglyn     As clouds their sappy cells, distil, as once     Ye used, your sunniest emanations     Toward the window where a woman kneels -     She who within that room in childish hours     Lay through the lasting murmur of blanch'd noon     Behind the sultry blind, now full now flat,     Drinking anew of every odorous breath,     Supremely happy in her ignorance     Of Time that hastens hourly and of Death     Who need not haste. Scatter your fumes, O lime,     Loose from each hispid star of citron bloom,     Tangled beneath the labyrinthine boughs,     Cloud on such stinging cloud of exhalations     As reek of youth, fierce life and summer's prime,     Though hardly now shall he in that dusk room     Savour your sweetness, since the very sprig,     Profuse of blossom and of essences,     He smells not, who in a paltering hand     Clasps it laid close his peaked and gleaming face     Propped in the pillow. Breathe silent, lofty lime,     Your curfew secrets out in fervid scent     To the attendant shadows! Tinge the air     Of the midsummer night that now begins,     At an owl's oaring flight from dusk to dusk     And downward caper of the giddy bat     Hawking against the lustre of bare skies,     With something of th' unfathomable bliss     He, who lies dying there, knew once of old     In the serene trance of a summer night     When with th' abundance of his young bride's hair     Loosed on his breast he lay and dared not sleep,     Listening for the scarce motion of your boughs,     Which sighed with bliss as she with blissful sleep,     And drinking desperately each honied wave     Of perfume wafted past the ghostly blind     Knew first th' implacable and bitter sense     Of Time that hastes and Death who need not haste.     Shed your last sweetness, limes!                             But now no more.     She, fruit of that night's love, she heeds you not,     Who bent, compassionate, to the dim floor     Takes up the sprig of lime and presses it     In pain against the stumbling of her heart,     Knowing, untold, he cannot need it now.