Page:New poems and variant readings, Stevenson, 1918.djvu/156

136 Lo! if so close this stands in your regard,

From some blind tap fish forth a drunken barn,

Who shall with charcoal, on the privy wall,

Immortalise your name for once and all.

IN LUPUM

the gates thou gav'st a field to till;

I have a larger on my window-sill.

A farm, d'ye say? Is this a farm to you,

Where for all woods I spay one tuft of rue,

And that so rusty, and so small a thing,

One shrill cicada hides it with a wing;

Where one cucumber covers all the plain;

And where one serpent rings himself in vain

To enter wholly; and a single snail

Eats all and exit fasting to the pool?

Here shall my gardener be the dusty mole.

My only ploughman the ... mole.

Here shall I wait in vain till figs be set,

And till the spring disclose the violet.

Through all my wilds a tameless mouse careers,

And in that narrow boundary appears,

Huge as the stalking lion of Algiers,

Huge as the fabled boar of Calydon.

And all my hay is at one swoop impresst

By one low-flying swallow for her nest,