What I viewed there once, what I view again Where the physic bottles stand On the table's edge,--is a suburb lane, With a wall to my bedside hand.
That lane sloped, much as the bottles do, From a house you could descry O'er the garden-wall: is the curtain blue Or green to a healthy eye?
To mine, it serves for the old June weather Blue above lane and wall; And that farthest bottle labelled "Ether" Is the house o'er-topping all.
At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper, There watched for me, one June, A girl: I know, sir, it's improper, My poor mind's out of tune.
Only, there was a way ... you crept Close by the side, to dodge Eyes in the house, two eyes except: They styled their house "The Lodge."
What right had a lounger up their lane? But, by creeping very close, With the good wall's help,--their eyes might strain And stretch themselves to Oes,
Yet never catch her and me together, As she left the attic, there, By the rim of the bottle labelled "Ether," And stole from stair to stair,
And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas, We loved, sir--used to meet: How sad and bad and mad it was-- But then, how it was sweet!
Here, evidently, the speaker, who has "come to die," has been aroused by some "reverend sir," who has been expostulating with him and uttering conventional phrases about the vanity of human life. Such superficial pessimism awakens protest, and the dying man remonstrates in the words of the poem.
The speaker is apparently in bed and hardly believes himself fully possessed of his senses. He even asks if the curtain is "green or blue to a healthy eye," as if he feared to trust his judgment, lest it be perverted by disease.
An abrupt beginning is very characteristic of a monologue, and when given properly, the first words arrest attention and suggest the situation.
After the speaker's bewildered repetition of the visitor's words and his blunt answer "not I," which says such views are not his own, he talks of his "bedside hand," turns a row of bottles into a street, and tells of the sweetest experience of his life. He refuses to say that it was not sweet; he will not allow an abnormal condition such as his sickness to determine his views of life. The result is an introspection of the deeper hope found in the heart of man.