For Olive

Pet was never mourned as you,

Purrer of the spotless hue,
Plumy tail, and wistful gaze
While you humoured our queer ways,
Or outshrilled your morning call
Up the stairs and through the hall –
Foot suspended in its fall –
While, expectant, you would stand
Arched, to meet the stroking hand;
Till your way you chose to wend
Yonder, to your tragic end.

Never another pet for me!
Let your place all vacant be;
Better blankness day by day
Than companion torn away.
Better bid her memory fade,
Better blot each mark she made,
Selfishly escape distress
By contrived forgetfulness,
Than preserve her prints to make
Every morn and eve an ache.

From the chair whereon she sat
Sweep her fur, nor wince thereat;
Rake her little pathways out
Mid the bushes roundabout;
Smooth away her talons’ mark
From the claw-worn pine-tree bark,
Where she climbed as dusk embrowned,
Waiting us who loitered round.

Strange it is this speechless thing,
Subject to our mastering,
Subject for her life and food
To our gift, and time, and mood;
Timid pensioner of us Powers,
Her existence ruled by ours,
Should–by crossing at a breath
Into safe and shielded death,
By the merely taking hence
Of her insignificance –
Loom as largened to the sense,
Shape as part, above man’s will,
Of the Imperturbable.

As a prisoner, flight debarred,
Exercising in a yard,
Still retain I, troubled, shaken,
Mean estate, by her forsaken;
And this home, which scarcely took
Impress from her little look,
By her faring to the Dim
Grows all eloquent of her.

Housemate, I can think you still
Bounding to the window-sill,
Over which I vaguely see
Your small mound beneath the tree,
Showing in the autumn shade
That you moulder where you played.

(Apologies to Thomas Hardy)