free-verse119 lines

Mrs. Effingham's Swan Song.

by Muriel Stuart

I am growing old: I have kept youth too long,

But I dare not let them know it now.

I have done the heart of youth a grievous wrong,

Danced it to dust and drugged it with the rose,

Forced its reluctant lips to one more vow.

I have denied the lawful grey,

So kind, so wise, to settle in my hair;

I belong no more to April, but September has not taught me her repose.

I wish I had let myself grow old in the quiet way

That is so gracious.... I wish I did not care.

My faded mouth will never flower again,

Under the paint the wrinkles fret my eyes,

My hair is dull beneath its henna stain,

I have come to the last ramparts of disguise.

And now the day draws on of my defeat.

I shall not meet

The swift, male glance across the crowded room,

Where the chance contact of limbs in passing has

Its answer in some future fierce embrace.

I shall sit there in the corners looking on

With the older women, withered and overblown,

Who have grown old more graciously than I,

In a sort of safe and comfortable tomb

Knitting myself into Eternity.

And men will talk to me because they are kind,

Or as cunning or as courtesy demands;

There will be no hidden question in their eyes

And no subtle implication in their hands.

And I shall be so grateful who have been

So gracious, and so tyrannous, moving between

Denial and surrender. To-morrow I shall find

How women live who have no lovers and no answer for life's grey monotonies.

Upon my table will be no more flowers,

They will bring me no more flowers till I am dead;

There will be no violent, sweet, exciting hours,

No wild things done or said.

Yet sometimes I'm so tired of it all -

This everlasting battle with the flesh,

This pitiful slavery to the body's thrall -

And then I do not want to lure or charm,

I want to wear

Soft, easy things, be comfortable and warm;

I want to drowse at leisure in my chair.

I do not want to wear a veil with heavy mesh,

Or sit in shaded rooms afraid to face the light;

I do not want to go out every night,

And be bright and vivid and intense,

Nor be on the alert and the defence

With other women, fierce and afraid as I,

Drawing a knife unseen as each goes by.

I am so tired of men and making love,

For every one's the same.

There's nothing new in love beneath the sun;

All love can say or do has long been said and done:

I have eaten the fruit of knowledge long enough,

Been over-kissed, over-praised and over-won.

Why should I try to play still the old, foolish game?

Because I have played the rose's part too long.

Who plays the rose must pay the rose's price,

And be a rose or nothing till it dies.

And even then sometimes the blood will answer fierce and strong

To the old hunger, to the old dance, old tune;

I shall feel cruel and passionate and mad

Though I have lost the look of June.

The fever of the past will burn my hands

As men who live long in intemperate lands

Feel the old ague wring them, far removed

From the old dreadful glitter of seas and sands.

The rose dies hard in women who have had

Lovers all their lives, and have been much loved.

I am afraid to grow old now even if I would.

I have fought too well, too long, and what was once

A foolish trick to make the rose more strangely gay

Is now a close-locked, mortal conflict of brain and blood -

A feud too old to settle or renounce.

I shall grow too tired to struggle, and the fight will end,

And they will enter in at last -

Nature and Time, long thwarted of their prey,

Those old grey two, more cruel for the lips that said them "Nay,"

For the bitterest foe is he who in the past

Has been repulsed when he would fain be friend.

I am sorry for women who are growing old,

I do not blame them holding youth with shameful hold,

Or doing desperate things to lips and eyes.

They have so pitifully short a flowering time,

So suddenly sweet a story so soon told.

They only strive to keep what men have taught them most to prize -

Men who have longer, fuller lives to live,

Who are not stopped and broken in their prime,

With their faces still to summer, Men do not know

What Age says to a woman. They would not wait

To feel slip from their hands without a throe,

Without a struggle, futile and desperate,

All that has given them wealth and love and power

Doomed, without hope or rumour of reprieve.

They would not smile into the eyes of that advancing hour

Who had bent all summer to their bow, and had flung

The widest rose and kissed the keenest mouth

And slept in the lordliest bed when they were young.

That bitter twilight which sun-worshipping Youth

Flies headlong keeps Age loitering on the hill,

Uneager to fold such greyness to his breast,

Knowing that none will thwart him of his will,

None be before him on that quest.

I am growing old.

I was not always kind when I was young

To women who were old, for Youth is blind -

A small, green, bitter thing beneath its fragrant rind,

And fanged against the old with boisterous tongue -

Those whose poor morning heads are touched with rime,

Walking before their misery like kings.

I did not think that I should feel such stings,

Nor flinch beneath such arrows. But now I know.

One day I shall be stupid and rather slow,

And easily cowed and troubled in my mind,

And tremulous, vaguely frightened, feeble and cold.

I am growing old.... My God! how old, how old! ...

I dare not tell them, but one day they will know...

I hope they will be kind.