From an Upper Verandah
What happier haunt could the gods allot
For loftiest musing to sage or bard?—
Yet I would that this upper verandah did not
Look down on my beautiful Neighbour's Back-yard!
I stir the afflatus: Descend, O ye Nine!
Let the crystalline gates of the soul be unbarred!
No. My thoughts will keep running in one fixed line—
The clothes-line that hangs in my Neighbour's Back-yard!
Let me gaze on the hills; let me think of the sea;
Of the dawn rosy-fingered—the night silver-starred:—
(What dear little feet must the owner's be
Of those stockings that hang in my Neighbour's Back-yard!)
Let me tune my soul to a measure devout:—
Ah, the musical mood is all jangled and jarred,
While things with borders, and things without,
Keep flutt'ring down there in my Neighbour's Back-yard!
Are the True and the Good and the Beautiful dead,
That I win not one gleam of Pierian regard?
(Does she suffer, I wonder, from cold in the head?—
Such a lot of mouchoirs in my Neighbour's Back-yard!)
Comes the fit. While it sways me, high themes would I sing!
Prometheus! Achilles! Have at you! En grade!
Alexander the Great—(oh that I were a string
On that apron hung out in my Neighbour's Back-yard!)
I will shut my eyes fast—I have hit it at last,
Now my purest Ideals flit by me unmarred;
And odours of memory rise from the past,
(And an odour of suds from my Neighbour's Back-yard!)
Ah, yes! when the eyelids together are prest,
Every vestige of earth we throw off and discard.
(These are flannels, I think. Is she weak in the chest?—
There! I'm looking again at my Neighbour's Back-yard!)
Since the Muses back out, let Philosophy in:
Let me ponder its problems cold and hard.
Ah! Philosophy dies in a celibate grin
At that bolster-case down in my Neighbour's Back-yard!
Oh shame on my rapidly silvering hairs!
Oh shame on this veteran battered and scarred!
I to be witched with these frilled—affairs!
Confound my neighbour! Confound her Back-yard!
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poem by James Brunton Stephens
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