AT FOUR SCORE
This is the house she was born in, full four-score years ago,
And here she is living still, bowed and ailing, but clinging
Still to this wonted life—like an ancient and blasted oak-tree,
Whose dying roots yet clasp the earth with an iron hold.
This is the house she was born in, and yonder across the bay
Is the home her lover builded, for her and for him and their children;
Daily she watched it grow, from dawn to the evening twilight,
As it rose on the orchard hill, 'mid the springtime showers and bloom.
There is the village church, its steeple over the trees
Rises and shows the clock she has watched since the day it was started—
O, many a year ago, how many she cannot remember.
Now solemnly over the water rings out the evening hour.
And there in that very church,—tho', alas, how bedizened, and changed!
They've painted it up, she says, in their queer, new, modern fashion,—
There on a morning in June, she gave her hand to her husband;
Her heart it was his (she told him) long years and years before.
Now here she sits at the window, gazing out on steeple and hill;
All but the houses are gone,—the church, and the trees, and the houses;—
All, all have gone long since, parents, and husband, and children;
And herself—she thinks, at times, she too has vanished and gone.
No, it cannot be she who stood in the church that morning in June,
Nor she who felt at her breast the lips of a child in the darkness;
But hark in the gathering dusk comes a low, quick moan of anguish—
Ah, it is she indeed, who has lived, who has loved, and lost.
For she thinks of a wintry night, when her last was taken away,
Forty years this very month, the last, the fairest, the dearest;
All gone—ah, yes, it is she who has loved, who has lost, and suffered,
She and none other it is, left alone in her sorrow and pain.
Still with its sapless roots, that stay tho' the branches have dropt—
Have withered, and fallen, and gone, their strength and their glory forgotten;
Still with the life that remains, silent, and faithful, and stedfast,
Through sunshine and bending storm clings the oak to its mother-earth.
