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April Twilights and Other Poems

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<h3>A SILVER CUP</h3> <div class="poetry"> <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> In Venice, Under the Rialto bridge, one summer morning, In a mean shop I bought a silver goblet. It was a place of poor and sordid barter, A damp hole filled with rags and rusty kettles, Fire-tongs and broken grates and mended bellows, And common crockery, coarse in use and fashion. Everything spoke the desperate needs of body, The breaking up and sale of wretched shelters, The frail continuance even of hunger. Misery under all—and that so fleeting! The fight to fill the pots and pans soon over, And then this wretched litter left from living. </div> <div class="stanza"> The goblet Stood in a dusty window full of charcoal, The only bright, the only gracious object. Because my heart was full to overflowing, Because my day to weep had not come near me, Because the world was full of love, I bought it. From all the wreckage there I took no warning;— Those ugly things outlasting hearts and houses, And all the life that men build into houses. Out of the jaws of hunger toothed with iron, Into the sun exultantly I bore it. Then, in the brightness of the summer sunshine, I saw the loops and flourishes of letters, The scattered trace of some outworn inscription,— Six lines or more, rubbed flat into the silver,{63} Dashes and strokes, like rain-marks in a snowdrift. Was it a prize, perhaps, or gift of friendship? Was its inscription hope, or recognition? Not heeding still, I bade my oarsman quicken, And once ashore, across the Square I hastened, Precipitate through the idlers and the pigeons, Behind the Clock Tower, to a cunning craftsman, There to exhort and urge the deft engraver, And crowd upon my cup another story; A name and promise in my memory singing. </div> <div class="stanza"> In Venice, Under the Rialto bridge, I bought you. Now you come back to me, such long years after, Your promise never kept, your hope defeated, Your legend now a thing for tears and laughter;— Though both your names are names of living people, Cut by the steady hand of that engraver While I stood over him and urged his deftness. He played the part; nor stopped to smile and tell me That for such words his art was too enduring. His living was to cut such stuff in silver! And now I have you, what to do, I wonder? The names, another smith can soon efface them,— But leave, so beautifully cut, the legend. Not from a poet’s book, but from the living Sad mouth of a young peasant boy, I took it; Four words, which mean that life is sweet together.{64} </div> <div class="stanza"> In some dark junk-shop window I shall leave you, Some place of poor effects from broken houses, Where desperate women go to sell a saucepan And frightened men to buy a baby’s cradle. Here, in New York, a city full of exiles, Short marriages and early deaths and heart-breaks: In some such window, with the blue glass vases, The busts of Presidents in plaster, gilded, Pawned watches, and the rings and chains and bracelets Given for love and sold for utter anguish, There I shall leave you, a sole gracious object. </div> <div class="stanza"> And hope some blind, bright eye will one day spy you— Some boy with too much love and empty pockets May read with quickening pulse your brief inscription, Cut in his mother-language, half forgotten, Four words which mean that life is sweet together; Rush in and count his coins upon the table, (A cup his own as if his heart had made it!) And bear you off to one who hopes as he does. So, one day, may the wish, for you, be granted. They will not know, these two, the names you cover; Mine and another, razed by violence from you, Nor his, worn down by time, the first possessor’s— Who had his story, which you never told me. {65}</div> </div></div> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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