Page:Reuben and other poems.pdf/12

 For here, amid the garden and the downs, Their still and simple life of well-loved toil, Toil that was life, and daily sweetness small, Reuben and Mercy led: a childless pair, Through forty years of mutual tenderness Each to the other child and parent grown. She was a little woman, shrivell’d, spare And apt, with beaming eyes and rosy cheeks And busy birdlike movements. I have thought, At times, the life they led, and he required, Solitary, same, pressed hard on Mercy. Hers Was a keen taste in little things; she loved That trivial, intimate, long-drawn-out talk Of daily happenings, in-and-out details, And chance of new-old changes, by whose help Women in villages make shift to weave Some kind of colour’d arabesque as fringe To Life’s web, hodden-gray. But seldom hers Such brightening; only of a Sunday morn, The greetings after church—he standing back Uneasy: or a spice of gossip to Some rare event of shopping—when the thought Of him there all alone wing’d her way back. Yet she was happy. Love was Life, to her, And all her life was love. Like some small brook Was Mercy, that, from meadows turn’d aside, Runs brightly in a bare place, buoyantly Babbling and dancing ’mid a fringe of flowers Itself has brought to birth: with no cascade Resplendent, and by no deep following pool