Poems (Hardy)/The mountain lioness

THE MOUNTAIN LIONESS

I

I HAD remembered it, the crunch of bones,
Almost too vividly to merely look
And let them pass, the woman with a book,
And that fair child with plaything cones
And bits of pebbles, while across the stones
Of my own spring he tripped and shook
'The very brake where I lay hid, and took
A rose as one takes lightly what he owns.
I had remembered it, and hunger lean,
Low crouching 'neath the brier, into his face
Breathed hotly through the tangled, fern-thick screen;
So close I breathed, so fierce, as to displace
His yellow curls, as though a wind blew by;
No other harm! This beast-pent soul knows why.

II

I was a woman once, a mother,—God,
That I remember it! that I still know!
I had a child like that; and 't was my woe
That, being beautiful, I therefore trod
The hearts of men as leaves upon the sod,
And tasked my soul its uttermost to show
That men the love of angels would forego
Even for my meanest smile, my faintest nod.
I let him die with him that loved us both;
Then men despised me, and I died to this:
A soulless beast, whose yellow whelps were loth
To own her, so died too. Oh, even to miss
Even then might make me loathe myself so deep,
My soul, long dead, would come to life and weep!