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Title: The White Moth
Author: Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch [
More Titles by Quiller-Couch]
If a leaf rustled, she would start:
And yet she died, a year ago.
How had so frail a thing the heart
To journey where she trembled so?
And do they turn and turn in fright,
Those little feet, in so much night?_
The light above the poet's head
Streamed on the page and on the cloth,
And twice and thrice there buffeted
On the black pane a white-wing'd moth;
'Twas Annie's soul that beat outside
And 'Open, open, open!' cried:
'I could not find the way to God;
There were too many flaming suns
For signposts, and the fearful road
Led over wastes where millions
Of tangled comets hissed and burned--
I was bewilder'd and I turned.
'O, it was easy then! I knew
Your window and no star beside.
Look up, and take me back to you!'
--He rose and thrust the window wide.
'Twas but because his brain was hot
With rhyming; for he heard her not.
But poets polishing a phrase
Show anger over trivial things;
And as she blundered in the blaze
Towards him, on ecstatic wings,
He raised a hand and smote her dead;
Then wrote '_That I had died instead!_'
[The end]
Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch's poem: White Moth
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