The Watershed

You say you are my friends,Coming mistily to greet me in your streets and places,Handing me roses which are not tinsel surely,That much is no gainsaying, but there it ends.For you, the friendly people, are a vision of massed faces,A large wavering smile of something I shrink to call derision.And yet I take your roses demurelyAnd express my obligation with a nice precision.Why should I quarrel with what Fate sends?

Poppycock! For indeed I am not a fool.Next year, perhaps, I shall be no more to you than a sick mountebank.Therefore, while I thank you for your roses,I hold apart and I too smile,Bitterly, if you will have it so; but whileI wonder you should laud me for a minute,I wonder more by what strange finger-ruleYou find your praise so easy to be spilt—The brimful ease of it your chief of poses.Am I the creature you have swiftly builtSince yesterday, who, formerly, for all you thought,Printed too light a circle even to round a naught?Or am I what you'll have me by to-morrow?There's worry to keep me busy dabbling in it,And pricks enough to start a pretty sorrow.

Don't think, you polype blur of friendliness,That any attitude you choose to takeAffects me otherwise than so much lessThan atom's atom. Scarcely for your sakeWould I consent even to notice whereYou seem most thickly to invest the air,Making a coloured rose-bud of the sun.Your sneers, I think, would leave me well awareOf something I might boast a bit of having;Your smooth and pitiless content with what I doShows up each whorl and roughness in the grainOf that harsh article I call my brain,Of that queer heart all twisted like a shavingI seldom fret about. So after beingEncumbered for a brief space by your rosesI think to find your subsequent composureAs apt and cheerful as a new disclosureBroke suddenly across a weary seeing.Your waning praise will mark a time of day,And afternoon approaching finds my waySo far advanced, that's all. You are a stageWe reach at ten o'clock and twelve is age.If I'm an episode, why so are you.We'll make a kindliness of that—what else is there to do?