Classic Poem

" Her room," you'd say — and wonder why you'd called it
Hers, as though she hadn't seven others
Not counting the reception room beside
The front door in red paper with a view
Of Paris in a bottle and real snow
Made out of something else and through the window
The railroad cutting where the trains went by
To Marly-le-château-du-roy: but somehow
Whether you came to dinner or to see
The last Picasso or because the sun
Blazed on her windows as you passed or just
Because you came, and whether she was there
Or down below in the garden or gone out
Or not come in yet, somehow when you came
You always crossed the hall and turned the doorknob
And went in; — " Her room" — as though the room
Itself were nearer her: as though the room
Were something she had left for you to see —
The room triangular with morning sunlight,
The room half-globed and low above the lamps,
The room oblique and leaning to the fire.
And yet it was not hers, not hers by title,
Nor hers because she'd had the walls redone
In rose to match the color of her dresses,
Nor hers because Le Bal du Comte Orgel
Lay on a chair and she had fixed the flowers,
Nor merely hers because she lived in it:
No one, — not the most precisely careless
Distributor of household knick-knacks, boxes,
Candlesticks, pillows, receptacles for ashes
Or photographs of children, — could have fixed
Its fine proportions in that attitude
Of gratified compliance worn by salons
Whose white and gold has settled into home;
And other men and women must have left
The touch of hands there — say, for one, old Gounod
Who'd written Mireille in the room and played
The airs from Baucis on the grand piano
And wasn't, you would understand, a man
To leave his mortal habitation empty
No matter how the doors had closed on him.
And yet you'd say, " Her room," as though you'd said
Her voice, Her manner, meaning something else
Than that she owned it, knowing it was not
A room to be possessed of, not a room
To give itself to people, not the kind
Of room you'd sit in and forget about,
Or sit in and look out from. It reserved
Something that in a woman you would call
Her reticence by which you'd mean her power
Of feeling more than she put into words —
Which in the room was more perhaps the windows
And what there was beyond them that you saw
Only in shadows on the floor and ceiling
Than anything the room itself contained.
It was all windows: as unwalled, as roofless,
As naked, as uncovered to the moon,
As bare to starlight as the heel-worn stones
Of any houseless cellar in Provence.
Even the chimney had been pierced and pried
To let a window in so that the grey
Faint sliding of the moon could move across
The hearth dissolving when the dying fire
Stirred in the ashes but returning still.
All windows — but not windows to look out from,
No more like windows that can open out
As easily on planets as on trees
Or people than her way of telling nothing
Was like another's way of telling all.
And yet they caught the stars. The stars were in them
Like living silver bubbles in black jade,
Like words in silence, like the wordless words
You found she had not spoken.
No, the room
Was hers by other right than that of owner
And other title than the claim of right,
Nor hers by love alone nor only hers
Because its present and its past contained her
The way the rooms of windy old châteaux
Contain the gestures of the men who died there,
Nor really hers at all perhaps but rather
Something she was that her own flesh and bones
Had never held of her or never yielded
Gesture or tongue to or quite understood.
Sometimes toward twilight when the windows seemed
Faintly to let the half-light ebb away
And through that lapsing and last fall of day
The ancient dark a moment showed itself
And then was darkness — in that moment — then —
The room made probable, made real, became
As strangely visible as if it were
The shape of something she was thinking of.

And there were afternoons when the snow fell
Softly across the wind and in the mirrors
The snow fell softly, flake on flake, the vague
Reflected falling in the long dim mirrors,
Faint snow across the image of the wind, —
And there were afternoons when the room remembered,
When her life passed in the mirrors of the room.