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A February Fancy
THIS is a common dream enough— | |
| You’ve dreamt it, friend, and so have I | |
| Along with like romantic stuff | |
| Of how and when a man would die. | |
| Futile! It matters little, when | 5 |
| Upon Death’s roll we’re reached and read | |
| Where are we; the one wish is then | |
| For more names ’twixt ours and the head. | |
| We lazy fellows like to prate | |
| Of battles o’er and marches done; | 10 |
| Yet in the grim king’s army great, | |
| Conscript, methinks, is every one. | |
| Yet more a fool than dreamer he | |
| (And fools in this are most alive) | |
| Who may in dreams, seen dreams to be, | 15 |
| Joy not. I’d die at half-past five, | |
| Then when the flood of Broadway’s tide | |
| Sets upward through the winter mist | |
| From the slim city’s either side, | |
| Drawn like thin glove on slender wrist; | 20 |
| With all the league of lights aflare, | |
| Above the hurrying roar and bustle | |
| That makes for avenue and square, | |
| As if for life were strained each muscle; | |
| When Trinity points, there below, | 25 |
| Still skyward, with its awful face | |
| Framed by the red sun’s afterglow, | |
| In solemn flame from spire to base— | |
| Then, in this queer old cross-town street, | |
| By some dim window, where, at length, | 30 |
| Day, dying, wholly failed to meet | |
| The task that taxed its noonday strength, | |
| As in my dull ear duller grew | |
| The hum, as fainter to my eyes | |
| The shimmer of the street-lamps through | 35 |
| The mist that took in two worlds’ rise, | |
| A moment would my numb brain seize | |
| What prank Fate played so straight-faced well, | |
| To keep me toiling like to these | |
| For what I could not dying tell— | 40 |
| A moment would there at the pest | |
| Flash laughter—far would buzz their hive, | |
| Then stilled this beat here in the breast, | |
| As night came down at half-past five. | |
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