FABLE
They met beside a babbling stream,
Old Death, young Love;
Dawn threw its ochre-tinted gleam
Through the leaves above.
‘Father, you look as sad as life,’
Said Love to Death.
‘Boy, keep your taunts for human strife,
Nor waste your breath.’
He dipped his scythe in the crystal tide,
Shook off the spray:
‘If youth for work has too much pride,
Go on your way.’
Love bit the end of a blade of grass
And bending low:
‘To-day you meet a pretty lass,
Dear Death, I trow.’
The Mower chuckled: ‘She is fair,
Fair as a flower.
I shall be rich with golden hair
Before an hour.’
‘Some girl whose lot it was to pine,
Drowned in a pool,
Leaving her pale-faced babe to whine
And grow ... a fool.’
‘No forlorn girl, no treacherous smiles
Of a passing churl;
Her mother baffled all your wiles
And kept the girl,
Stainless for me to bear above
In the month of May,’
Made answer Death to the stripling Love
In the dawn of day.
‘Each mortal mother and mortal Eve
They play our game,
And we might sleep from morn till eve
’Twould be the same.
Your tale, good sir, is very sad
But hardly new.’
Old Death sat down beside the lad:
‘The tale is true,
The house is near, around the door
Vine branches creep....’
But ere the Wanderer could say more
He fell asleep.
So now the saucy imp was blithe;
Holding his breath,
The sable cloak and glittering scythe
He took from Death
And laugh gaily skipped away,
Upon his quest.
He pushed the door with vine leaves gay,
The ghostly guest;
The mother led him to the room
With curtains blue,
Where the girl was waiting for her doom
And left the two.
He sat him down beside the lass
And took her hand,
She smiled and thought that in the glass
Would stop the sand.
But he kissed her lips, the pretty lad,
He kissed her eyes....
When came the Mower grim and sad
To claim his prize—
Having at last from his trance awoke—
He found instead
His scythe wrapt in his sable cloak
On the silken bed.