Is this your final stage, this meagre room,
Where sun, a feeble jester in the fog,
Is lost at mid-day, while the sedulous gloom Hangs somber curtains for your epilogue? You that have paid in full each rosy debt;
And every sparkling story have re-told;
And what was spacious made more spacious yet—
Have nothing left that’s beautiful to hold.
But even so, in your once candid gaze,
Grown shadowy now, no intimations gleam Of height and breadth and more resplendent days: And all your past felicity would seem A tale you have no fancy to recall—
Rapt in a girl, a narrow bed, a wall.
ISSUE: Autumn 1927