Analysis of Interlude: The Hearth And The Window

Thou cricket, that at dusk in the damp weeds,
all that, alack! my sickly garden breeds,
silverest the brown air with thy liquid note
now eve is sharp, I, hearkening, dream remote
the home my exiled heart hath somewhere known
far from these busy days that make me lone,
in twilit past, where the soon autumn damp
is gather'd black above the yellow lamp
that guides my feet towards the rustic roof
infrequent, on the forest edge, aloof,
as I return, nor fail to greet the way
(ah, when?) the witness of my childish play,
and feel that soon the silver-piled snow
will make the watches warm beside the glow
that just reveals, amid the enfolding gloom,
the smoky joists of the familiar room:
and while thy supper-song is shrilling thro'
that well-kept nook, my musing shall renew
its kindred of romance, the friendly throng
that haunts the winters when the nights are long.

Dusk lowers in this uneasy pause of rain;
a blackness clings and thickens on the pane
and damp grows; westward only, watery pale,
two yellow streaks, wan glory, slowly fail:
night shall be loud and thick with driving spears. —
And this was also in the haunting years
this life hath never known, nor this abode,
when the lone window watch'd the lonely road
winding into the exiled west, across
the desolate plain, with, seldom on its fosse
tipt black against grey gloom, a poplar spire;
and I could know the sunset's broken fire
burn'd sombrely in many a leaden glass
whose look was dead amid the morbid grass
where never a dancing foot of harvest came
and ways were lost, a land of vanish'd name.