Thou cricket, that at dusk in the damp weeds, <br />all that, alack! my sickly garden breeds, <br />silverest the brown air with thy liquid note <br />now eve is sharp, I, hearkening, dream remote <br />the home my exiled heart hath somewhere known <br />far from these busy days that make me lone, <br />in twilit past, where the soon autumn damp <br />is gather'd black above the yellow lamp <br />that guides my feet towards the rustic roof <br />infrequent, on the forest edge, aloof, <br />as I return, nor fail to greet the way <br />(ah, when?) the witness of my childish play, <br />and feel that soon the silver-piled snow <br />will make the watches warm beside the glow <br />that just reveals, amid the enfolding gloom, <br />the smoky joists of the familiar room: <br />and while thy supper-song is shrilling thro' <br />that well-kept nook, my musing shall renew <br />its kindred of romance, the friendly throng <br />that haunts the winters when the nights are long. <br /> <br />Dusk lowers in this uneasy pause of rain; <br />a blackness clings and thickens on the pane <br />and damp grows; westward only, watery pale, <br />two yellow streaks, wan glory, slowly fail: <br />night shall be loud and thick with driving spears. — <br />And this was also in the haunting years <br />this life hath never known, nor this abode, <br />when the lone window watch'd the lonely road <br />winding into the exiled west, across <br />the desolate plain, with, seldom on its fosse <br />tipt black against grey gloom, a poplar spire; <br />and I could know the sunset's broken fire <br />burn'd sombrely in many a leaden glass <br />whose look was dead amid the morbid grass <br />where never a dancing foot of harvest came <br />and ways were lost, a land of vanish'd name.<br /><br />Christopher John Brennan<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/interlude-the-hearth-and-the-window/
