free-verse52 lines
To Knole
by Victoria Mary Sackville-WestOctober 1, 1913
I
I left thee in the crowds and in the light,
And if I laughed or sorrowed none could tell.
They could not know our true and deep farewell
Was spoken in the long preceding night.
Thy mighty shadow in the garden's dip!
To others dormant, but to me awake;
I saw a window in the moonlight shake,
And traced the angle of the gable's lip,
And knew thy soul, benign and grave and mild,
Towards me, morsel of morality,
And grieving at the parting soon to be,
A patriarch about to lose a child.
For many come and soon their tale is told,
And thou remainest, dimly feeling pain,
Aware the time draws near to don again
The sober mourning of the very old.
II
Pictures and galleries and empty rooms!
Small wonder that my games were played alone;
Half of the rambling house to call my own,
And wooded gardens with mysterious glooms.
My fingers ran among the tassels faded;
My playmates moved in arrases brocaded;
I slept beside the canopied and shaded
Beds of forgotten kings.
I wandered shoeless in the galleries;
I contemplated long the tapestries,
And loved the ladies for their histories
And hands with many rings.
Beneath an oriel window facing south
Through which the unniggard sun poured morning streams,
I daily stood and laughing drank the beams,
And, catching fistfuls, pressed them in my mouth.
This I remember, and the carven oak,
The long and polished floors, the many stairs,
Th' heraldic windows, and the velvet chairs,
And portraits that I knew so well, they almost spoke.
III
So I have loved thee, as a lonely child
Might love the kind and venerable sire
With whom he lived, and whom at youthful fire
Had ever sagely, tolerantly smiled;
In whose old weathered brain a boundless store
Lay hid of riches never to be spent;
Who often to the coaxing child unbent
In hours' enchantment of delightful lore.
So in the night we parted, friend of years,
I rose a stranger to thee on the morrow;
Thy stateliness knows neither joy nor sorrow,,
I will not wound such dignity by tears.