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The Veil, and Other Poems

Chapter 18: WHO'S THAT?
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About This Book

The collection assembles short lyric and narrative poems that blend pastoral observation, eerie wonder, and quiet melancholy. Many pieces evoke nighttime or liminal settings, where imagination and memory animate ordinary scenes into encounters with fairies, spectres, or uncanny beauty. Voices range from whimsical to mournful, moving through snapshots of nature, domestic objects, and human regret, while formal restraint and vivid sensory detail create dreamlike moods. Recurring concerns include the power of perception, the edge between waking and dreaming, and the consolation or peril found in remembrance and fancy.

WHO'S THAT?

WHO'S that? Who's that?...
Oh, only a leaf on the stone;
And the sigh of the air in the fire.
Yet it seemed, as I sat,
Came company—not my own;
Stood there, with ardent gaze over dark, bowed shoulder thrown
Till the dwindling flames leaped higher,
And showed fantasy flown.
Yet though the cheat is clear—
From transient illusion grown;
In the vague of my mind those eyes
Still haunt me. One stands so near
I could take his hand, and be gone:—
No more in this house of dreams to sojourn aloof, alone:
Could sigh, with full heart, and arise,
And choke, 'Lead on.'