VISIONARY CINEMA
Or trampled on the earth; a chain of straw
Which had been twisted round the tender stem
Of a young apple-tree lay at its root,
,I
The bark was nibbled round by truant sheep.
Margaret stood near, her infant in her arms
And seeing that my eye was on the tree
She said, 'I fear it will be dead and gone
Ere R obert come again.'
5.05
And finally, the end, abrupt, and arousing in us that brother's love
in which we bless her in the impotence of grief:
Meanwhile her poor hut
Sank to decay, for he was gone, whose hand
At the first nippings of October frost
Closed up each chink, and with fresh bands of straw
Chequered the green-grown thatch. And so she lived
Through the long winter, reckless and alone;
Till this reft house, by frost, and thaw, and rain
Was sapped, and, when she slept, the nightly damps
Did chill her breast, and in the stormy day
H er tattered clothes were ruffled by the wind
Even at the side of her own fire. Yet still
She loved this wretched spot, nor would for worlds
Have parted hence, and still that length of road
And this rude bench one torturing hope endeared,
Fast rooted at her heart; and here, my friend,
In sickness she remained, and here she died,
Last human tenant of these ruined walls."
Three visions of a
spot
made progressively more wretched by the
yearning strength of a hope too willing to be fed, and yet three visions
in which the visible is either very hard to see indeed, or else does not
yield up to the eye the full purchase it has made upon realit!'. In the
first, the aged narrator sits against a sunset, hears the cry of
a
solitary
infant and stares at the corner stones on either side of the door. He sees a
pastoral emblem, but one that shows a falling-away; the discolored
stones, with their dull red stains, their tufts and hairs of wool, subtly tell
of a collapse from cu ltivation back to the wild. The red-stained stone is
itself a sunset, and the infant's cry of loneliness is another sunset, the
three together betokening the twilight figure of Margaret, that lingering
sunset whose slow self-destruction is the process that the poem
enacts~
In the second passage, the old man scrutinizes Margaret's ruined garden,
and sees again a series of tokens that only the eye of the mind car) link
together. Where fixities and definites in the first passage dissolve into
