Classic Poem

When ye began, ere yet her flesh was cold,
To rifle chest and drawer, and bag for thrift
Each chased goblet and each jeweled gift,
Think ye I cared for what I lost in gold?
When ye began, ere yet her flesh was cold,
To smirch, with desperate slander black and swift,
The man of grief whom ye had cast adrift,
Think ye I cared for my good name of old? —
How could ye, could ye, ye whom the dear dead
Had loved so long the dearest, next to one
Who planted vines with her and shared her bed
(Bed in the windowed moonlight, vines in sun),
So mock the memory of that sacred head
And all the gentle deeds that she had done.
When Love's dear relics were exposed to view
On court-house table and bossed with our state-seal,
Intestate, with the sire's intestate too,
The Civil Law that guards our commonweal
Decided all, like Solomon deciding
Between the women, — rather, not as he;
For his decision reckoned the Abiding,
And followed from his cunning sympathy
With the heart's ownership. Who once did ask
Of me heart's ownership? — Who ever said,
" Has this or that some touch of your dear dead
Whereby 'tis yours? " — The law fulfilled its task
(Mistake me not, it did): much can be done,
When heirs are reckless of the other one,

Done strictly after law. ... And I demurred
But once, once only. O the foolish aim,
The dazed boy-impulse of my honest word
Protesting! — Friends (I mean in fact, not name),
Can you conceive me, when I here confess
I spoke, O not to gain myself a jot,
A tittle, of the cursed golden pot,
But as defender of her defenselessness ...
As still the guardian of her right — a fool,
Whose eyes, though they had seen the coffin hid,
Whose ears, though they had heard the sod on lid,
Still saw, still heard her ... as a child from school,
Who feels its own dead mother on the stair,
And sets her place at table and her chair.

And now three years have passed; and I, for one
Who walked in tattered shoes from hill to coast
Long years in youth, with friends a comic toast
At Grub-Street banquets, I the ragged son
Of pauper Johnson, brother of Chatterton,
Am now, despite whatever the law withdrew,
Still " comfortably fixed, " with Stocks (a few)
And Mortgages (still ripening in the sun
Of Six Per Cent). ... Yes, " comfortably fixed, "
As say my messmates at the Club. — And she,
With whom alone it would have been to me
Some comfort, now irrevocably mixed
With Earth, the Bosomer! — How often, friends,
Think you, I reckon up my dividends?