A POEM THAT ELEANOR SENT AMORY SEVERAL YEARS
LATER
by: F. Scott Fitzgerald
(1896-1940)
- ERE, Earth-born,
over the lilt of the water,
- Lisping its music and bearing a burden of light,
- Bosoming day as a laughing and radiant daughter . . .
- Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night.
- Walking alone . . . was is splendor, or what, we were bound
with,
- Deep in the time when summer lets down her hair?
- Shadows we loved and the patterns they covered the ground
with
- Tapestries, mystical, faint in the breathless air.
-
- That was the day . . . and the night for another story,
- Pale as a dream and shadowed with penciled trees--
- Ghosts of the stars came by who had sought for glory,
- Whispered to us of peace in the plaintive breeze,
- Whispered of old dead faiths that the day had shattered,
- Youth the penny that bought delight of the moon;
- That was the urge that we knew and the language that mattered
- That was the debt that was paid to the userer June.
-
- Here, deepest of dreams, by the waters that bring not
- Anything back of the past that we need not know,
- What if the light is but sun and the little streams sing
not,
- We are together, it seems . . . I have loved you so . . .
- What did the last night hold, with the summer over,
- Drawing us back to the home in the changing glade?
- What leered out of the dark in the ghostly clover?
- God! . . . till you stirred in your sleep . . . and were
wild afraid . . .
-
- Well . . . we have passed . . . we are chronicle now to the
eerie.
- Curious metal from meteors that failed in the sky;
- Earth-born the tireless is stretched by the water, quite
weary,
- Close to this ununderstandable changeling that's I . . .
- Fear is an echo we traced to Security's daughter;
- Now we are faces and voices . . . and less, too soon,
- Whispering half-love over the lilt of the water . . .
- Youth the penny that bought delight of the moon.
"A Poem That Eleanor Sent Amory
Several Years Later" is reprinted from This Side of Paradise.
F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Scribners, 1920. |
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