At My Enemy's Gate

As I passed my enemy’s gate
In the summer afternoon,
On my pathway, stealthy as Fate,
Crept a shadow vague and chill:
The bright spirit, the rainbow grace
Of sweet, hovering thought, gave place
To a nameless feeling of loss,
A dark sense of something ill.

Whereupon I said, in my scorn,
“ There should grow about his door
Nothing but thistle and thorn,
Shrewd nettle, dogwood, and dock;
Or three-leaved ivy that twines
A bleak ledge with poisonous vines,
And black lichens that incrust
The scaly crest of a rock! ’ ’

Then I looked, and there, on the ground,
Were two lovely children at play;
The door-yard turf all around
Was spotted with daisies and pinks; From his apple-trees showered the notes
Of a dozen ecstatic throats,
And up from the grass-lot below
Came the gossip of bobolinks.

And, behold! like a cloud, overhead,
Flocked a multitude of white doves!
They circled round stable and shed,
Alighting on sill and roof:
All astir in the sun, so white,
All a-murmur with love, the sight
Sent a pang to my softening heart,
An arrow of sweet reproof.

And I thought of our foolish strife,
And “How hateful is hate! ” I said.
“ Under all that we see of his life
Is a world we never may know,
With its sorrows, and solace, and dreams;
And even though bad as he seems,
He is as he is for a cause,
And Nature accepts him so.

“ She gives this foeman of mine
Of the best her bounty affords, —
Sends him the rain and the shine,
And children whom doubtless he loves;
She fosters his horses and herds,
And surrounds him with blossoms and birds:
And why am I harder of heart
To his faults than the daisies and doves ?

“ To me so perverse and unjust,
He has yet in his uncouth shell
Some kernel of good, I will trust,
Though a good I never may see:
And if, for our difference, still
He cherishes grudge and ill-will,
The more ’s the pity for him, —
And what is his hatred to me?”

So for him began in my heart
The doves to murmur and stir,
The pinks and daisies to start,
And make golden afternoon.
And now, in the wintry street,
His frown, if we chance to meet,
Brings back, with my gentler thoughts,
The birds and blossoms of June.