C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Edith (Nesbit) Bland (18581924)
A Tragedy
To think and read and write;
He does not smell the new-mown hay,
The roses red and white.
His silly, stupid wife;
The world seems tasteless, dead and done—
An empty thing is life.
Of light upon the lawn;
I sometimes walk and watch it there
Until the chill of dawn.
The books he loves to read;
I only have a heart and hand
He does not seem to need.
Thin fingers, cold and mild;
O God of love, who answers prayer,
I wish I were a child!
(He least would know or see)
That ere love gathers next year’s rose,
Death will have gathered me;
And round-faced daisies grow:
He still will read and write and think,
And never, never know!
Now you are gone:
I loved to see your white gown ’mid the flowers,
While hours on hours
I studied—toiled to weave a crown of fame
About your name.
To hear you sing
About the house while I sat reading here,
My child, my dear;
To know you glad with all the life-joys fair
I dared not share.
My love, you know,
When I could lay with laurels at your feet
Love’s roses sweet;
I thought I could taste love when fame was won—
Now both are done!
The passionate kiss
Which I dared never give, lest love should rise
Mighty, unwise,
And bind me, with my life-work incomplete,
Beside your feet.
My one chance went;
You died, my little one, and are at rest—
And I, unblest,
Look at these broken fragments of my life,
My child, my wife.