free-verse84 lines

Friendship's Garland

by Sir John Collings Squire

I

When I was a boy there was a friend of mine:

We thought ourselves warriors and grown folk swine,

Stupid old animals who never understood

And never had an impulse and said "you must be good."

We slank like stoats and fled like foxes,

We put cigarettes in the pillar-boxes,

Lighted cigarettes and letters all aflame,

O the surprise when the postman came!

We stole eggs and apples and made fine hay

In people's houses when people were away,

We broke street lamps and away we ran,

Then I was a boy but now I am a man.

Now I am a man and don't have any fun,

I hardly ever shout and I never, never run,

And I don't care if he's dead that friend of mine,

For then I was a boy and now I am a swine.

II

We met again the other night

With people; you were quite polite,

Shook my hand and spoke a while

Of common things with cautious smile;

Paid the usual debt men owe

To fellows whom they used to know.

But, when our eyes met full, yours dropped,

And sudden, resolute, you stopped,

Moving with hurried syllables

To make remarks to someone else.

I caught them not, to me they said:

"Let the dead past bury its dead,

Things were very different then,

Boys are fools and men are men."

Several times the other night

You did your best to be polite;

When in the conversation's round

You heard my tongue's familiar sound

You bent in eager pose my way

To hear what I had got to say;

Trying, you thought with some success,

To hide the chasm's nakedness.

But on your eyes hard films there lay;

No mock-interest, no pretence

Could veil your blank indifference;

And if thoughts came recalling things

Far-off, far-off, from those old springs

When underneath the moon and sun

Our separate pulses beat as one,

Vagrant tender thoughts that asked

Admittance found the portal masked;

You spurned them; when I'd said my say,

With laugh and nod you turned away

To toss your friends some easy jest

That smote my brow and stabbed my breast.

Foolish though it be and vain

I am not master of my pain,

And when I said good-night to you

I hoped we should not meet again,

And wondered how the soul I knew

Could change so much; have I changed too?

III

There was a man whom I knew well

Whose choice it was to live in hell;

Reason there was why that was so

But what it was I do not know.

He had a room high in a tower,

And sat there drinking hour by hour,

Drinking, drinking all alone

With candles and a wall of stone.

Now and then he sobered down,

And stayed a night with me in town.

If he found me with a crowd,

He shrank and did not speak aloud.

He sat in a corner silently,

And others of the company

Would note his curious face and eye,

His twitching face and timid eye.

When they saw the eye he had

They thought, perhaps, that he was mad:

I knew he was clear and sane

But had a horror in his brain.

He had much money and one friend

And drank quite grimly to the end.

Why he chose to die in hell

I did not ask, he did not tell.

Friendship's Garland by Sir John Collings Squire — Stanza