Yet I have loved these walls -- grave with spaced etchings, darkened by their books, like stones that mellowing mosses climb -- have loved the furniture cherished of time: firm contours and old colours, with the flare of russet bittersweet in a green bowl and the black Persian shawl of my great-grandmother flung, like her gracious shadow, on this chair. Yes, I have loved soft rugs, and softer flowers, the silver and the cedarwood, the purple, the fine linen that is ours. I have loved things more intimately known than men and women, things that, beyond the feeble flesh, endure, aged and fine, familiar and secure. Yes, I have loved . . . And now I stand reproved by you, who want for this bodily tenement as temporal a house as some brief tent -- you, whose sole cedar grows on Lebanon, shaking its awful banners like a paean, you, whose sole purple is the dawn adored above the desert, you, whose sole linen is the weave abhorred that was the loin-cloth of the Galilean. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...AUTUMN MORNING AT CAMBRIDGE by FRANCES CROFTS DARWIN CORNFORD THE RUBAIYAT, 1879 EDITION: 18 by OMAR KHAYYAM WINTER RAIN by CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI LAMENT OF THE IRISH EMIGRANT by HELEN SELINA SHERIDAN THE GYPSIES [OR, GIPSIES] by HENRY HOWARTH BASHFORD AN EVENING HYMN by JOSEPH BEAUMONT GLIMPSES OF CHILDHOOD: 1. MOTHER MAGIC by RICHARD EUGENE BURTON |