Page:Poems Rossetti.djvu/204

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176
SHUT OUT.
She sleeps below,
She wakes and laughs above;
To-day, as she walked, let us walk in love:
To-morrow follow so.


SHUT OUT.
THE door was shut I looked between
Its iron bars; and saw it lie,
My garden, mine, beneath the sky,
Pied with all flowers bedewed and green:

From bough to bough the song-birds crossed,
From flower to flower the moths and bees;
With all its nests and stately trees
It had been mine, and it was lost.

A shadowless spirit kept the gate,
Blank and unchanging like the grave.
I, peering through, said; "Let me have
Some buds to cheer my outcast state."

He answered not. "Or give me, then,
But one small twig from shrub or tree,
And bid my home remember me
Until I come to it again."