wished to be. She,
conceding his attitude toward her, asks him to concede,
in turn, that such a thing as mutual love HAS been.
There's a slight retaliation here of the wounded spirit.
But her heart, after all, MUST have its way; and it cherishes
the hope that his soul, which is now cabined, cribbed, confined,
may be set free, through some circumstance or other,
and she may then become to him what he is to her. And then,
what would it matter to her that she was ill-favored?
All sense of this would be sunk in the strange joy that
he possessed her as she him, in heart and brain. Hers has been a love
that was life, and a life that was love. Could one touch
of such love for her come in a word of look of his, why,
he might turn into her ill-favoredness, she would know nothing of it,
being dead to joy.

A Tale.

(The Epilogue to `The Two Poets of Croisic'.)

The speaker in this monologue is the wife of a poet,
and she tells the story to her husband, of the little cricket
that came to the aid of the musician who was contending for a prize,
when one of the strings of his lyre snapped. So he made a statue
for himself, and on the lyre he held perched his partner in the prize.
If her poet-husband gain a prize in poetry, she asks, will some ticket
when his statue's built tell the gazer 'twas a cricket helped
his crippled lyre; that when one string which made "love" sound soft,
was snapt in twain, she perched upon the place left vacant
and duly uttered, "Love, Love, Love", whene'er the bass
asked the treble to atone for its somewhat sombre drone?

Confessions.

The speaker is a dying man, who replies very decidedly in the negative
to the question of the attendant priest as to whether he views
the world as a vale of tears. The memory of a past love,
which is running through his mind, still keeps the world bright.
Of the stolen interviews with the girl he loved he makes confession,
using the physic bottles which stand on a table by the bedside
to illustrate his story.

The monologue is a choice bit of grotesque humor touched with pathos.

Respectability.

By the title of the poem is meant respectability according to
the standard of the beau monde.

The speaker is a woman, as is indicated in the third stanza.
The monologue is addressed to her lover.

Stanza 1 shows that they have disregarded the conventionalities
of the beau monde. Had they conformed to them, many precious months
and