Love Songs in Age

　　She kept her songs, they took so little space,

　　The covers pleased her:

　　One bleached from lying in a sunny place,

　　One marked in circles by a vase of water,

　　One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her,

　　And coloured, by her daughter -

　　So they had waited, till in widowhood

　　She found them, looking for something else, and stood

　　Relearning how each frank submissive chord

　　Had ushered in

　　Word after sprawling hyphenated word,

　　And the unfailing sense of being young

　　Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein

　　That hidden freshness, sung,

　　That certainty of time laid up in store

　　As when she played them first. But, even more,

　　The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,

　　Broke out, to show

　　Its bright incipience sailing above,

　　Still promising to solve, and satisfy,

　　And set unchangeably in order. So

　　To pile them back, to cry,

　　Was hard, without lamely admitting how

　　It had not done so then, and could not now.