THE MIRROR TELLS

The following poem, from A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad, is rarely reprinted, for the obvious reason.  The poem refers to the myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection.  (Narcissus and Jonquil are two names for the same flower.)  I think that the first stanza is the most effective.  Below Housman's poem I have placed one of my own, probably uconsciously inspired by his, though mine clearly does not refer to Narcissus.

                            XV 

         Look not in my eyes, for fear

            They mirror true the sight I see,

         And there you find your face too clear

            And love it and be lost like me.  

         One the long nights through must lie

           Spent in star-defeated sighs,
         But why should you as well as I
            Perish? gaze not in my eyes.

         A Grecian lad, as I hear tell,

             One that many loved in vain,

         Looked into a forest well
              And never looked away again. 

         There, when the turf in springtime flowers,
                With downward eye and gazes sad,
         Stands amid the glancing showers 
            A jonquil, not a Grecian lad.

THE MIRROR TELLS

(For Gilbert)

The mirror shows me how I have decayed:
My sagging muscles, wrinkles, and tired eyes;
How brutal time took from me, in rough trade,
My youth and strength, but didn’t leave me wise.

And, on reflection, I look back to when,

Always envisioning something marvelous,
I trolled the bars behind the shouldering men—
Gods, warm and hard, fragrant and dangerous.
                      

And, caught up in the strenuous, sensual dance
In which each man both won and was the prize,
I, whom they never gave a backward glance,
Had failed, in all that time, to recognize 

How much I’d lost—until one day, by chance,
I found myself reflected in your eyes.  

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