SUNSHINE THROUGH A COOBWEBBED WINDOW
by Amy Lowell
What charm is yours, you faded old-world tapestries,Of outworn, childish mysteries,Vague pageants woven on a web of dream!And we, pushing and fighting in the turbid streamOf modern life, find solace in your tarnished broideries.Old lichened halls, sun-shaded by huge cedar-trees,The layered branches horizontal stretched, like JapaneseDark-banded prints. Carven cathedrals, on a skyOf faintest colour, where the gothic spires flyAnd sway like masts, against a shifting breeze.Worm-eaten pages, clasped in old brown vellum,shrunkFrom over-handling, by some anxious monk.Or Virgin's Hours, bright with gold and gravenWith flowers, and rare birds, and all the Saints of Heaven,And Noah's ark stuck on Ararat, when all the world had sunk.They soothe us like a song, heard in a garden,sungBy youthful minstrels, on the moonlight flungIn cadences and falls, to ease a queen,Widowed and childless, cowering in a screenOf myrtles, whose life hangs with all its threads unstrung.
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