Lundy's Lane and Other Poems

by Duncan Campbell Scott

 

BY A CHILD'S BED

 
SHE breathèd deep,
  And stepped from out life's stream
Upon the shore of sleep;
And parted from the earthly noise,
Leaving her world of toys,
5

To dwell a little in a dell of a dream.

THEN brooding on the love I hold so free,
  My fond possessions come to be
Clouded with grief;
These fairy kisses,
10
This archness innocent,
Sting me with sorrow and disturbed content:
I think of what my portion might have been,
A dearth of blisses,
A famine of delights,
15

If I had never had what now I value most;
Till all I have seems something I have lost;
A desert underneath the garden shows,
And in a mound of cinders roots the rose.

HERE then I linger by the little bed,
20
  Till all my spirit's sphere,
Grows one half brightness and the other dead,
One half all joy, the other vague alarms;
And, holding each the other half in fee,
Floats like the growing moon
25
That bears implicitly
Her lessening pearl of shadow
Clasped in the crescent silver of her arms.