C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Emily Chubbuck Judson (Fanny Forrester) (1817–1854)
Watching
S
The dusty day is done.
Lo! from afar the freshening breezes sweep
Wide over groves of balm;
Down from the towering palm,
In at the open casement cooling run:
And round thy lowly bed,
Thy bed of pain,
Bathing thy patient head,
Like grateful showers of rain,
They come;
While the white curtains, waving to and fro,
Fan the sick air;
And pityingly the shadows come and go,
With gentle human care,
Compassionate and dumb.
The night begun.
While prayerful watch I keep,
Sleep, love, sleep!
Is there no magic in the touch
Of fingers thou dost love so much?
Fain would they scatter poppies o’er thee now,
Or, with a soft caress,
The tremulous lip its own nepenthe press
Upon the weary lid and aching brow.
While prayerful watch I keep,
Sleep, love, sleep!
The bells are swinging,
Their little golden circles in a flutter
With tales the wooing winds have dared to utter,
Till all are ringing
As if a choir
Of golden-nested birds in heaven were singing:
And with a loving sound
The music floats around,
And drops like balm into the drowsy ear,
Commingling with the hum
Of the Sepoy’s distant drum,
And lazy beetle ever droning near.
Sounds these of deepest silence born,
Like night made visible by morn;
So silent, that I sometimes start
To hear the throbbing of my heart,
And watch, with shivering sense of pain,
To see thy pale lids lift again.
Peeps from the mortise in surprise
At such strange quiet after day’s harsh din;
Then ventures boldly out,
And looks about,
And with his hollow feet
Treads his small evening beat,
Darting upon his prey
In such a tricksy, winsome sort of way,
His delicate marauding seems no sin.
But noiselessly;
The bells a melancholy murmur ring,
As tears were in the sky;
More heavily the shadows fall,
Like the black foldings of a pall,
Where juts the rough beam from the wall;
The candles flare
With fresher gusts of air;
The beetle’s drone
Turns to a dirge-like, solitary moan:
Night deepens, and I sit, in cheerless doubt, alone.