At last you yielded up the album,
Once open, sent me distracted.
All your
Matt and glossy on the thick black pages!
Too much confectionery, too rich:
I choke on such nutritious images.
My swivel eye hungers from pose to pose —In pigtails, clutching a reluctant cat;
Or furred yourself, a sweet girl-graduate;
Or lifting a heavy-headed
Beneath a trellis, or in a trilby-hat(Faintly disturbing, that, in several ways) —From every side you strike at my control,
Not least through those these disquieting chaps who
At ease about your earlier days:
Not quite your class,
I'd say, dear, on the whole.
But o, photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing! that
Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,
And will not censor
Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards,
But shows a cat as disinclined, and shadesA chin as doubled when it is, what
Your candour thus confers upon her face!
How overwhelmingly
That this is a real girl in a real place,
In every sense empirically true!
Or is it just the past?
Those flowers, that gate,
These misty parks and motors,
Simply by being you;
Contract my heart by looking out of date.
Yes, true; but in the end, surely, we
Not only at exclusion, but
It leaves us free to cry.
We know what
Won't call on us to
Our grief, however hard we yowl
The gap from eye to page.
So I am
To mourn (without a chance of consequence)You, balanced on a bike against a fence;
To wonder if you'd spot the
Of this one of you bathing; to condense,
In short, a past that no one now can share,
No matter whose your future; calm and dry,
It holds you like a heaven, and you
Unvariably lovely there,
Smaller and clearer as the years go by.
