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When the
gusts are at play with the trees on the lawn,
And the
lights are put out in the vault of the night;
When within all is snug, for the
curtains are drawn,
And the fire is aglow and the lamps
are alight,
Sometimes,
as I muse, from the place where I am
My
thoughts fly away to a room near the Cam.
‘Tis a ramshackle room, where a man might complain
Of a slope in the ceiling, a rise in
the floor;
With a view on a court and a glimpse on a lane,
And no end of cool wind through the chinks of the
door;
With a deep-seated chair that I love to recall,
And some groups of young oarsmen in shorts on the
wall.
There's a fat jolly jar of tobacco,
some pipes—
A meerschaum, a briar, a cherry, a clay—
There's a three-handled
cup fit for Audit or Swipes
When the breakfast is done and the plates
cleared away.
There 's a litter of papers, of books a scratch
lot,
Such as Plato, and Dickens, and Liddell and Scott
And a crone in a bonnet that ‘s more like a rag
From a mist of remembrance steps
suddenly out;
And her funny old tongue never
ceases to wag
As she tidies the room where she
bustles about;
For a man may be strong and a man
may be young,
But he can’t put a drag on a
Bedmaker’s tongue.
And, oh, there's a youngster who
sits at his ease
In the hope, which is vain, that the
tongue may run down,
With his feet on the grate and a
book on his knees,
And his cheeks they are smooth and
his hair it is brown.
Then
I sigh myself back to the place where I am
From
that ramshackle room near the banks of the Cam.
R.C.
LEHMANN.
Feb.
9, 1910.
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