Llewellyn and the Tree
Could he have made Priscilla shareThe paradise that he had planned,Llewellyn would have loved his wifeAs well as any in the land.
Could he have made Priscilla ceaseTo goad him for what God left out,Llewellyn would have been as mildAs any we have read about.
Could all have been as all was not,Llewellyn would have had no story;He would have stayed a quiet manAnd gone his quiet way to glory.
But howsoever mild he wasPriscilla was implacable;And whatsoever timid hopesHe built—she found them, and they fell.
And this went on, with intervalsOf labored harmony betweenResounding discords, till at lastLlewellyn turned—as will be seen.
Priscilla, warmer than her name,And shriller than the sound of saws,Pursued Llewellyn once too far,Not knowing quite the man he was.
The more she said, the fiercer clungThe stinging garment of his wrath;And this was all before the dayWhen Time tossed roses in his path.
Before the roses ever cameLlewellyn had already risen.The roses may have ruined him,They may have kept him out of prison.
And she who brought them, being Fate,Made roses do the work of spears,—Though many made no more of herThan civet, coral, rouge, and years.
You ask us what Llewellyn saw,But why ask what may not be given?To some will come a time when changeItself is beauty, if not heaven.
One afternoon Priscilla spoke,And her shrill history was done;At any rate, she never spokeLike that again to anyone.
One gold October afternoonGreat fury smote the silent air;And then Llewellyn leapt and fledLike one with hornets in his hair.
Llewellyn left us, and he saidForever, leaving few to doubt him;And so, through frost and clicking leaves,The Tilbury way went on without him.
And slowly, through the Tilbury mist,The stillness of October goldWent out like beauty from a face.Priscilla watched it, and grew old.
He fled, still clutching in his flightThe roses that had been his fall;The Scarlet One, as you surmise,Fled with him, coral, rouge, and all.
Priscilla, waiting, saw the changeOf twenty slow October moons;And then she vanished, in her turnTo be forgotten, like old tunes.
So they were gone—all three of them,I should have said, and said no more,Had not a face once on BroadwayBeen one that I had seen before.
The face and hands and hair were old,But neither time nor penuryCould quench within Llewellyn’s eyesThe shine of his one victory.
The roses, faded and gone by,Left ruin where they once had reigned;But on the wreck, as on old shells,The color of the rose remained.
His fictive merchandise I boughtFor him to keep and show again,Then led him slowly from the crushOf his cold-shouldered fellow men.
“And so, Llewellyn,” I began—“Not so,” he said; “not so, at all:I’ve tried the world, and found it good,For more than twenty years this fall.
“And what the world has left of meWill go now in a little while.”And what the world had left of himWas partly an unholy guile.
“That I have paid for being calmIs what you see, if you have eyes;For let a man be calm too long,He pays for much before he dies.
“Be calm when you are growing oldAnd you have nothing else to do;Pour not the wine of life too thinIf water means the death of you.
“You say I might have learned at homeThe truth in season to be strong?Not so; I took the wine of lifeToo thin, and I was calm too long.
“Like others who are strong too late,For me there was no going back;For I had found another speed,And I was on the other track.
“God knows how far I might have goneOr what there might have been to see;But my speed had a sudden end,And here you have the end of me.”
The end or not, it may be nowBut little farther from the truthTo say those worn satiric eyesHad something of immortal youth.
He may among the millions hereBe one; or he may, quite as well,Be gone to find again the TreeOf Knowledge, out of which he fell.
He may be near us, dreaming yetOf unrepented rouge and coral;Or in a grave without a nameMay be as far off as a moral.