This was the world: It was a house
With a cool hallway end to end
Where buckets, pans and dippers hung,
And coats that in the breezes swung;
And eaves in which ’twas good to browse
On books stored in a musty box.
Along the walks were lilac boughs,
And by the windows hollyhocks.
And there were fields down to the hills
Which marked the earth’s far boundary;
A church-spire at the roadway’s bend,
And barns and cribs and twinkling mills,
And neighbor friends like Mrs. Gray,
And endless days of dream and play.
It was a world so guarded, safe,
So cherished by a God-watched sky
Seeing the summers come and pass,
A world so quiet it appeared
Like to the mimic world ensphered
By witchery of the old field glass
Which from an uncle’s drawer I took
Upon the distant hills to look.
You know not then that worlds not dead
Lie back of you and bide their chance
To seize your world of ignorance:
There was an opening in the ceiling
Above the kitchen where the man
Sat humming to himself at night
Amid the enshadowed candle-light,
And played on his accordion
Happy, unconscious and alone.
There full of mischief would I lie
And watch him through the ceiling’s hole,
And laugh for thought of elfish tricks,
Of whispering words or dropping sticks
To fright his well contented soul.
Sometimes I think there is an eye
Which is not God’s that spies upon us;
That other worlds may lie about us
Our fathers or our mothers lived,
Where Forces lurk and laugh and wait.

Here then was my world’s fair estate—
For so I knew it—could it be
Disturbed or wrecked? I never thought
That change or loss could come to me,
With God above the church’s spire....

But what are all these April dreams?
Less tangible the landscape seems;
The windmills, barns and houses swim
In a sphered ether, wheeling, dim.
Red cattle on green meadows pass
Across a belt of bluest sky
Like objects in the old field glass.
The chickens stalk about the yard
Like phantom things in my regard
And songs and cries and voices sound
Like muffled echoes from the ground.
Stones and dead sticks crawl and move;
And bones that through the winter lay
Something of living power betray.
I sink in all things dizzily,
Made one with nature, all I see,
Until I have no way to prove
My separate identity.
Yet death is what? Why, death is this:
Something that comes but is far off.
They worry sometimes for my cough.
I know they watch me, know they cry,
But what can wreck my earth or sky?

The doctor comes now every day
And with my father sits and talks,
Or stands about the garden walks.
One day I hear them: “It appears
Sometimes in ten or twenty years
As madness or paralysis.
Sometimes it passes, leaves a scar
And never troubles one again.
You say you had this in the war?
It’s hit your boy as phthisis,
Also I think he’s going blind.”
I saw my father trembling wind
Some plucked grass round and round his hand.
They noticed me, walked further on
And left me dreaming where I sat.

Some years since that day now are gone.
I have no world now, none but night.
My father’s world lay back of mine
And wrecked my world so guarded, safe,
So cherished by a God-watched sky
Which looked on summers rise and pass,
So like an image caught and held
By witchery of the old field glass.