Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, FADED, by AUGUSTA DAVIES WEBSTER


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

FADED, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Ah face, young face, sweet with unpassionate joy
Last Line: Filling my stillness here. She sings it well.
Alternate Author Name(s): Home, Cecil; Webster, Mrs. Julia Augusta
Subject(s): Memory; Old Age; Women


AH face, young face, sweet with unpassionate joy,
Possessful joy of having all to hope—
Rich, measureless, nameless, formless, all to hope—
Fair, happy, face with the girl's questioning smile
Expectant of an answer from the days,
Fair, happy, morning, face who wast myself,
Talk with me, with this later drearier self.
Oftenest I dare not see thee: but alone,
Thou and I in the quiet, while, without,
Dim eve goes dwindling her hushed, hueless, light
And makes the leaden dusk before the stars—
While, if my duller eyes through envious tears
Reply to thine, there's none at hand to note,
Nor yet thyself, in the sad and pensive calm,
Wilt flout me for my faded look of thee,
As when thou mock'st me in the untender noon—
While now we two a little time are one,
Elder and girl, the blossoming and the sere,
One blended, dateless, woman for an hour—
Thou and I thus alone, I read from thee
My lesson what I was; which (ah, poor heart!)
Means trulier my lesson, bitter to learn,
Of what I cease to be.

Fie, cruel face!
Too comely, thou. Thy round curves shame my cheeks;
Thy gloss of almond-bloom in the March sun
Affronts my hardened reds; thy satiny brow,
Like smooth magnolia petals warmly white,
Enforces all my tale of fretted lines;
The quivering woof of sunshine through thy hairs
Shows mine's spent russets deader. All in thee
That's likest me to-day is proof the more
Of my to-day's unlikeness. Ah! I have waned.
As every summer wanes, that, all the while,
Seems to grow still more summer, till, one day,
The first dead leaves are falling and all's past.
Myself has faded from me; I am old.

Well, well, what's that to fret for? Yet, indeed,
'Tis pity for a woman to be old.
Youth going lessens us of more than youth:
We lose the very instinct of our lives—
Song-birds left voiceless, diswinged flies of the air.
And the loss comes so soon; and ere we know:
We have so many many after years,
To use away (the unmarried ones at least)
In only withering leisurely. Ah me!
Men jeer us clinging, clinging pitiably,
To that themselves account whole all for us:
Aye, but what man of them could bear, as we must,
To live life's worth a stinted dozen years.
And the long sequel all for learning age.
Why, if we try to cheat the merciless world
That bids us grow old meekly and to the hour,
(Like babes that must not cry when bed-time comes)
And, being old, be nothing—try, maybe,
To cheat our lingering selves as if Time lingered—
Is our fault other than the toil in vain
Of any shipwrecked swimmer who, miles from land,
No sail in sight, breasts the resistless sea,
And perishing will not perish? Oh, 'tis known
How bankrupt men will hopelessly, impotent,
Battle each inch with unforgiving ruin,
Waste their tired brains on schemes a child should laugh at,
Befool their hearts with more unbodied hopes
Than shadows flung by momentary spray,
Tease their unwilling faces into smiles
And loathingly look contentment—but, at best,
To gain some futile hour from certainty:
But we in our utter loss, outlawed from life,
Irretrievable bankrupts of our very selves,
We must give ruin welcome, blaze our fact
Of nothingness—"good friends, perceive I am old;
Pray laugh and leave me." We are fools, we sin,
Abjectly, past all pardon, past all pity,
We women, if we linger, if, maybe,
We use our petty melancholy arts
And are still women some filched year or two—
Still women and not ghosts, not lifeless husks,
Spent memories that slink through the world and breathe,
As if they lived, and yet they know they are dead.

Once, long ago, I dreamed I had truly died:
My numb void body, in its winding-sheet,
Lay ignorant, but I, grown viewlessness,
Met my home's dear ones still; I spoke, methought,
Words which they marked not, smiled unanswered smiles,
And then I wept, and clung about their necks,
Closer, with vain embracing; and one said
(Another ghost, a voice, I searched not what)
"Thou art all dead for them; they cannot know,"
And still replied "They felt not," or "They heard not,"
"They cannot, thou being dead," until ere long
The anguish of it waked me——to be thus,
With them yet so forlorn of sense of theirs!
'Twas in my happiest days, when, like new fronds
Uncurling coil by coil on ferns in May
And widening to the light and dews and air,
The girl grows woman gladly, but, untold,
That dream clung like a sorrow, and, for pity,
I hoped the poor lone dead should bide apart,
Never among their living. Like that dream,
Lost and alone, I haunt our world to-day.

How strange life is!—a woman's—if, I mean,
One miss a woman's destiny and sole hope,
The wife's dear service with its round of tasks
And sweet humilities and glad fatigues,
And anxious joy of mothers—strange indeed!
To wait and wait, like the flower upon its stalk,
For nothing save to wither! And the while
Knows she that she is waiting? Maybe, yes:
And maybe, no. That new-made shallow lake,
Asleep there in the park, knows not, asleep,
It waits the brook next rain-fall shall let loose
To brim it with full waters, bear it on
Filling its further channel: girls so wait,
Careless and calm, not judging what shall be;
Only they know life has not reached them yet,
And till life come they'll dream and laugh in the sun.
And the sun shines, and the dumb days flit by
And make no sign for working ... till, at time,
To her whom life and love need the voice comes
Which names her wife among the happier many:
And till to her, maybe, who not again
Shall know rest and sweet dreams, nor in the world
Call anywhere her home, nor laugh at ease,
Nor spend her toils on those who'll love her for them,
Dawns change and the hour of wonder while she wakes
Alone in the eastwinds of a barren world:
And till to her to whom life never comes,
Whether by joy or sorrows or by toil,
The sunshine has grown drought, the calm, decay;
And there's the woman old.
Poor imaged mock,
Thou art more than I to-day; thou hast my right,
My womanhood's lost right to meet pleased eyes
And please by being happy. Many a time
I note, forgotten, how thy youth, that lasts,
Earns thee companionship of lingering looks,
Thy smile a tenderness whereof nought's mine.
Thou hast a being still; but what am I?
A shadow and an echo—one that was.

Well, Time's thy tyrant too: there waits for thee
In the sure end the day thou wilt have faded.
Carelessly thou'lt be lifted from thy place,
Too long usurped, where there'll, room being given,
Bloom some such other face, nor thine be missed—
As a newer rose, alike as roses are,
Makes us the self-same sweet as yesterday's—
As in the river's stream an on-come wave,
That is to pass, fills all the other filled
That took the drift before it and has passed—
As we have our succession, woman to woman,
And so no smiles are missed, there being enough.
I shall not know it: winters of many years
Before then long may have annulled my grave,
My date may be so back past household talk
'Tis out of guess whose the vague counterfeit
That on the canvas has past memory
Smiled peering through the dirt-crust and the cracks.
Yes; after me thou'lt years and years be thus,
Be young, be fair, be, dumb unconscious toy,
Beloved for youth and fairness; but at the end
Age and decay for thee too. Face of mine,
Forgotten self, thou art woman after all:
Sooner or later we are one again:
Both shall have had our fate ... decay, neglect,
Loneliness, and then die and never a one
In the busy world the poorer for our loss.

How dusk it is! Have I sat indeed so long?
I had not marked. Time to have been long since
In the merry drawing-room with its lights and talk
And my young sisters' music. Hark! that's sweet.
Maudie's clear voice sends me my favourite song,
Filling my stillness here. She sings it well.





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