Friendship's Garland

When I was a boy there was a friend of mine:We thought ourselves warriors and grown folk swine,Stupid old animals who never understoodAnd never had an impulse and said "you must be good."

We slank like stoats and fled like foxes,We put cigarettes in the pillar-boxes,Lighted cigarettes and letters all aflame--O the surprise when the postman came!

We stole eggs and apples and made fine hayIn people's houses when people were away,We broke street lamps and away we ran,Then I was a boy but now I am a man.

Now I am a man and don't have any fun,I hardly ever shout and I never, never run,And I don't care if he's dead that friend of mine,For then I was a boy and now I am a swine.

We met again the other nightWith people; you were quite polite,Shook my hand and spoke a whileOf common things with cautious smile;Paid the usual debt men oweTo fellows whom they used to know.But, when our eyes met full, yours dropped,And sudden, resolute, you stopped,Moving with hurried syllablesTo make remarks to someone else.I caught them not, to me they said:"Let the dead past bury its dead,Things were very different then,Boys are fools and men are men."Several times the other nightYou did your best to be polite;When in the conversation's roundYou heard my tongue's familiar soundYou bent in eager pose my wayTo hear what I had got to say;Trying, you thought with some success,To hide the chasm's nakedness.But on your eyes hard films there lay;No mock-interest, no pretenceCould veil your blank indifference;And if thoughts came recalling thingsFar-off, far-off, from those old springsWhen underneath the moon and sunOur separate pulses beat as one,Vagrant tender thoughts that askedAdmittance found the portal masked;You spurned them; when I'd said my say,With laugh and nod you turned awayTo toss your friends some easy jestThat smote my brow and stabbed my breast.Foolish though it be and vainI am not master of my pain,And when I said good-night to youI hoped we should not meet again,And wondered how the soul I knewCould change so much; have I changed too?

There was a man whom I knew wellWhose choice it was to live in hell;Reason there was why that was soBut what it was I do not know.

He had a room high in a tower,And sat there drinking hour by hour,Drinking, drinking all aloneWith candles and a wall of stone.

Now and then he sobered down,And stayed a night with me in town.If he found me with a crowd,He shrank and did not speak aloud.

He sat in a corner silently,And others of the companyWould note his curious face and eye,His twitching face and timid eye.

When they saw the eye he hadThey thought, perhaps, that he was mad:I knew he was clear and saneBut had a horror in his brain.

He had much money and one friendAnd drank quite grimly to the end.Why he chose to die in hellI did not ask, he did not tell.