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OLD FITZ, who from your suburb grange, Where once I tarried for a while, Glance at the wheeling Orb of change, And greet it with a kindly smile; Whom yet I see as there you sit Beneath your sheltering garden-tree, And while your doves about you flit, And plant on shoulder, hand and knee, Or on your head their rosy feet, As if they knew your diet spares Whatever moved in that full sheet Let down to Peter at his prayers; Who live on milk and meal and grass; And once for ten long weeks I tried Your table of Pythagoras, And seem’d at first ‘a thing enskied’ (As Shakespeare has it) airy-light To float above the ways of men, Then fell from that half-spiritual height Chill’d, till I tasted flesh again One night when earth was winter-black, And all the heavens flash’d in frost; And on me, half-asleep, came back That wholesome heat the blood had lost, And set me climbing icy capes And glaciers, over which there roll’d To meet me long-arm’d vines with grapes Of Eshcol hugeness; for the cold Without, and warmth within me, wrought To mould the dream; but none can say That Lenten fare makes Lenten thought, Who reads your golden Eastern lay, Than which I know no version done In English more divinely well; A planet equal to the sun Which cast it, that large infidel Your Omar; and your Omar drew Full-handed plaudits from our best In modern letters, and from two, Old friends outvaluing all the rest, Two voices heard on earth no more; But we old friends are still alive, And I am nearing seventy-four, While you have touch’d at seventy-five, And so I send a birthday line Of greeting; and my son, who dipt In some forgotten book of mine With sallow scraps of manuscript, And dating many a year ago, Has hit on this, which you will take My Fitz, and welcome, as I know Less for its own than for the sake Of one recalling gracious times, When, in our younger London days, You found some merit in my rhymes, And I more pleasure in your praise. |