TENUOUS, brittle, enigmatic things,
These dim spoils of a long-spent summer lie;
They have doffed their crowns, they have furled their
painted wings,
They have laid their glory by.
Each has her little epitaph writ clear,
Like some long-dead and purbeck-coffined dame,
To mark her kinship and her life’s last year,
And tell her Latin name.
Not to the earth that gave them life they fell,
There to be folded in their cradle-clay;
No wind bereft their stems of bud and bell,
No throbbing raindrops gray.
Here each must wear the mask that was her face,
Long since despoiled of all its pearl and rose;
And none may win in any hidden place
Oblivion’s dark repose.
They are and are not. Even ghosts may pass
In moonlight through a garden changed and chill,
And see the shadows fret the silver grass,
But these lie blind and still.
Between the eternal leaves of some great book
The dreams of our dead summers may be set,
Lifeless and colorless, yet with a look
Of phantom beauty yet.
Then Fate must keep that company forlorn,
In prisoning pages neatly classified,
For she alone knows whence each dream was born,
And in what wise it died.
DOROTHY MARGARET STUART