Fame is a fickle food (1702)

Mid-morning Monday she is staring
peaceful as the rain in that shallow back yard
she wears flannel bedroom slippers
she is sipping coffee
she is thinking—
—gazing at the weedy bumpy yard
at the faces beginning to take shape
in the wavy mud

217
Ambition was my idol, which was broken
Before the shrines of Sorrow and of Pleasure;
And the two last have left me many a token
O'er which reflection may be made at leisure:
Now, like Friar Bacon's brazen head, I've spoken,
'Time is, Time was, Time's past', a chymic treasure
Is glittering youth, which I have spent betimes—
My heart in passion, and my head on rhymes.

The house in which we now lived was old—
dark rooms and low ceilings.
Once our maid, who happened to be Hungarian,
reached her hand up into the cupboard for a dish
and touched a dead rat
that had crawled there to die—poisoned, no doubt.
“Disgusting, disgusting,” she kept saying in German
and, to my amusement, shuddered whenever she thought of it.

I
Land of Refuge

A mountain of white ice
standing still
in the water
here forty fathoms deep
and flowing swiftly
from the north;

These hills are sandy. Trees are dwarfed here. Crows
Caw dismally in skies of an arid brilliance,
Complain in dusty pine-trees. Yellow daybreak
Lights on the long brown slopes a frost-like dew,
Dew as heavy as rain; the rabbit tracks
Show sharply in it, as they might in snow.
But it’s soon gone in the sun—what good does it do?
The houses, on the slope, or among brown trees,

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Tempora labuntur, tacitisque senescimus annis,
Et fugiunt freno non remorante dies.
Ovid, Fastorum, Lib. vi. "O Cæsar, we who are about to die
Salute you!" was the gladiators' cry
In the arena, standing face to face
With death and with the Roman populace.

they thought the field was wasting
and so they gathered the marker rocks and stones and
piled them into a barn they say that the rocks were shaped
some of them scratched with triangles and other forms they
must have been trying to invent some new language they say
the rocks went to build that wall there guarding the manor and
some few were used for the state house
crops refused to grow

I
I heard a small sad sound,
And stood awhile among the tombs around:
"Wherefore, old friends," said I, "are you distrest,
Now, screened from life's unrest?"

II
—"O not at being here;