The Downstairs Bedroom

The old man liked his room downstairs; he lay,

Listening and still, day after wintry day,

Close to quick kitchen footsteps, whistling boys

Out in the street, his daughter's dominant voice

Coming and going in the nearby hall.

And in the iron stove the coals would fall

Softly and hissing, while the windowpanes

Would rattle, running with the sleety rains.

Clear mornings, sleigh-bells tossed an icy peal

Against keen air, or a laborious wheel

Went wincing over roads of hardened snow.

Toward twilight, sometimes, a faint fiery glow

From the burnt west illumined the big tree,

Whose trunk in the north window he could see

Across the room. It stood there solid, straight,

Strength for a frail old man to contemplate,

To ponder. Long and long ago the boughs,

That touched the upstairs windows of the house,

Were what he looked at from his young man's bed,

Looked at but never saw, though light was shed

Ever so lovely on the fragile leaves,

The delicate twigs rubbing against the eaves.

Little or nothing had the young man cared,

For trembling bloom those nights he'd lain and stared

Wakeful, facing the moon; no silvered green

Had those eyes, glistening wide-open, seen,

But all his own immense romantic schemes,

~ Only his beautiful and dubious dreams.

The old man felt so peacefully apart

From all that had been once his urgent heart.

His dim gaze, squinting, saw quite plain at last

The tree itself. And so the winter passed ;

And he lay still, content to be downstairs,

Not too remote from all brisk house affairs,

Yet conscious quietly, and with no fear

Of deep earth close outside, and strong roots near.