Quo Musa Tendis? :: :: University of Virginia Library

Sitting on a garden-seat,
All a summer afternoon,
Reading, while the envious heat
Haunts you like a weary tune:
Watching other people playing,
Playing at a certain game;
Bodies flitting, twisting, swaying:
White balls flying, white forms vying
With each other: can you blame
One who says: “The worst of men is
He who first devised Lawn-Tennis”?

In a villa's garden plot
Such a game might be allowed:
When a London square grows hot,
Let a fashionable crowd
Gather, where the brown turf hardens,
With their Sunday hats and racquets:
But in perfect College gardens

Made for leisure, rife with pleasure,
Where men go in flannel jackets,
Read their books, and dream their dreams,
Forge their future volumes' themes;

Is it decent, is it right,
That a man should have to look at
Such a desolating sight,
One so made to throw a book at,
As a little don that's prancing,
With a wild, perspiring air,
All about the court is dancing,
Gallopading, masquerading,
Though nor grace nor strength be there
As an athlete? Let him do it
Somewhere else, or duly rue it.

Nay, more: it was here, was it not,
That we wandered, two friends and I,
Past the end of June, when a large half-moon
Sailed sad in a sober sky,
And the trees that were leafy and thick forgot
To be green, and the mist-wreaths wandered by.

And the world beyond was a dim expanse
Of blue that was green, and green that was blue,
And the bushes were black which enclosed our track,
And the flowers were dashed with a blackness too,
And caught in a rapture, or rapt in a trance,
The garden was waiting: such hours are few!

For at first there were remnants of rosy light
On the tall grey chapel beyond the trees,
And the west not ablaze, but aglow with rays
That had faded: a whisper of rest the breeze,
And the silence a tremulous still delight,
And the unseen meadows as unseen seas.

And we noted a spot where the purple shade,
Which hid the tree-trunks and dimmed the grass,
Seemed to mean far more than it meant before,
Till all that we fancied took shape and was:
And we looked on a deep, reposeful glade,
Whence Satyr and Dryad and Faun might pass.

And that's what the garden must mean for me,
For me and my friends who were there that night:
What wonder, then, if I hate the men
Who prove beyond doubt, when the noon is bright,
That my glade is a lawn which can easily be
Deformed with horrible squares of white,
And peopled with forms that offend my sight.