Yet I have loved these walls -- grave with spaced etchings, darkened by their books, like stones that mellowing mosses climb -- have loved the furniture cherished of time: firm contours and old colours, with the flare of russet bittersweet in a green bowl and the black Persian shawl of my great-grandmother flung, like her gracious shadow, on this chair. Yes, I have loved soft rugs, and softer flowers, the silver and the cedarwood, the purple, the fine linen that is ours. I have loved things more intimately known than men and women, things that, beyond the feeble flesh, endure, aged and fine, familiar and secure. Yes, I have loved . . . And now I stand reproved by you, who want for this bodily tenement as temporal a house as some brief tent -- you, whose sole cedar grows on Lebanon, shaking its awful banners like a paean, you, whose sole purple is the dawn adored above the desert, you, whose sole linen is the weave abhorred that was the loin-cloth of the Galilean. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE CRADLE SONG OF THE POOR by ADELAIDE ANNE PROCTER THE MILL by EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON THE MASK OF ANARCHY; WRITTEN ON OCCASION OF MASSACRE AT MANCHESTER by PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY SONNETS OF MANHOOD: 45. A LITTLE WHILE by GEORGE BARLOW (1847-1913) THE BRIDES' TRAGEDY: ACT 1, SCENE 1 by THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES |