Dear love, when I was seven and a half,
I dreamed this prologue to your epitaph,
Precise in miniature, and more exact
In fantasy than the mechanic fact:
I adored your double in a china figure,
Or you, a shadow that the sun makes bigger.
I loved this prodigy better than myself;
He lived upon a lady's mantel-shelf;
His eyes were gold; his hair a sable silvered:
My heart beheld him, borrowed, begged, and pilfered,
Until the lady, with a look oblique,
Said, " Darling, you may take him if you like;
I have found a most enchanting pair, of Chelsea. "
Then, like an aspen, in ecstatic palsy,
From head to foot I shook with happiness:
The thing was you, and neither more nor less
Than my true love, whom I have always known
Whether shaped of air, or alabaster stone,
Or earth, or fire; your own true self it was,
Whom later I translated into glass
To make a mockery of the thing adored:
It was a little image of my lord;
Or else presentiment caused the counterfeit
Presentment to appear as exquisite
Almost — for I must only say " almost " —
As the child of Mary and the Holy Ghost.
I dreamed my china creature was divine;
I was his mother; he was safely mine;
He was my lover, waited and welcome:
Through feathered snow I tiptoed to my home.
Thus was inaugurate the ordeal of pain
That made you iron, who were porcelain:
Ah, poor anatomy, the type and token
Of mortal love, how often were you broken!
Poor love, compounded out of clay and sand,
How often were you broken in my hand!
Alas the child, that had the will to cherish,
And you were broken, and at point to perish!
Yet were you never quite completely killed,
Or ground to powder, and your beauty spilled;
You were too fine for me, and far too good,
Who had deserved a stick of hickory wood;
And you were battle-scarred and tempest-tossed,
And rescued late; miraculously lost,
Abandoned, and beneath an attic rafter,
Lifted from drifted dust a fortnight after;
And (most yourself) you suffered all the while
Without a word, and with a little smile:
My father said: " You've smashed your china boy. "
And put you coolly, like a common toy,
In that green bag, which, as the grave our griefs,
Garnered the scanty harvest of his briefs.
O, had my father truly been your friend,
Dear love, it had been kinder in the end
To sweep you to a heap of china clay,
And smooth your bed, and leave you where you lay
In rainbow bits, and all your troubles ended!
He took you to a shop and had you mended:
And, through the porcelain white as buds of privet,
A clever artisan had thrust a rivet,
Until, from silver head to scarlet heel,
You were become a gentleman of steel
Which pierced your vitals to preserve you whole,
The iron even entering your soul,
Which, by this brutal pang, contrived to save
The pieces of the bravest of the brave:
So, in this cruel fashion, were you mended;
And you were broken; but you were not bended.
And then, as now, most intricately knit
From iron and its earthen opposite,
From clay's fragility and its crumbling petal,
And from the nobler fabric of the metal,
The stuff of fields, the substance of the sword,
I recognized the image of my lord,
Whom I have loved, whom I have ever known
Whether in light or in the thunder-stone;
The broken man, who broke my heart in half
In this strange prologue to your epitaph.