Classic Poem

In the cold wind, towers grind round,
Turning, turning, on the ground;

In among the plains of corn
Each tower seems a unicorn.

Beneath a sad umbrageous tree
Anne, the goose-girl, could I see—

But the umbrageous tree behind
Ne'er cast a shadow on her mind—

A goose-round breast she had, goose-brains,
And a nose longer than a crane's;

A clarinet sound, cold, forlorn,
Her harsh hair, straight as yellow corn,

And her eyes were round, inane
As the blue pebbles of the rain.

Young Anne, the goose-girl, said to me,
‘There's been a sad catastrophe!

The aged Countess still could walk
At a hundred and forty years, could talk,

And every eve in the crystal cool
Would walk by the side of the clear fish-pool.

But today when the Countess took her walk
Beneath the apple-trees, from their stalk

The apples fell like the red-gold crown
Of those kings that the Countess had lived down,

And they fell into the crystal pool;
The grandmother fish, enjoying the cool—

(Like the bright queens dyed on a playing-card,
They seemed, as they fanned themselves, flat and hard)—

Floated in long and chequered gowns
And, darting, searched for the red-gold crowns

In the Castles drownèd long ago
Where the empty years pass weedy-slow,

And the water is flat as equality
That reigns over all in the heavenly

State we aspire to, where none can choose
Which is the goose-girl, which is the goose. . . .

But the Countess climbed up the apple-tree,
Only to see what she could see—

Because to persons of her rank
The usual standpoint is that of the bank! . . .’

The goose-girl smoothed down her feather-soft
Breast . . . ‘When the Countess came aloft,

King James and his courtiers, dressed in smocks,
Rode by a-hunting the red-gold fox,

And King James, who was giving the view-halloo
Across the corn, too loudly blew,

And the next that happened was—what did I see
But the Countess fall'n from the family tree!

Yet King James could only see it was naughty
To aspire to the high at a hundred and forty,

“Though if” (as he said) “she aspired to climb
To Heaven—she certainly has, this time!”’

. . . And Anne, the goose-girl, laughed, ‘Tee-hee,
It was a sad catastrophe!’