As if—­forgive now—­should you let me sit
     Here by the window, with your hand in mine,
     And look a. half-hour forth on Fiesole,
     Both of one mind, as married people use,
     Quietly, quietly the evening through,
     I might get up to-morrow to my work
     Cheerful and fresh as ever.  Let us try. 
     To-morrow, how you shall be glad for this! 
     Your soft hand is a woman of itself,
     And mine, the man’s bared breast she curls inside. 
     Don’t count the time lost, neither:  you must serve
     For each of the five pictures we require;
     It saves a model.  So! keep looking so—­My
     serpentining beauty, rounds on rounds!—­How
     could you ever prick those perfect ears,
     Even to put the pearl there! oh, so sweet—­My
     face, my moon, my everybody’s moon,
     Which everybody looks on and calls his,
     And I suppose is looked on by in turn,
     While she looks—­no one’s:  very dear, no less. 
     You smile? why, there’s my picture ready made;
     There’s what we painters call our harmony! 
     A common grayness silvers everything,—­
     All in a twilight, you and I alike—­
     You at the point of your first pride in me
     (That’s gone, you know)—­but I at every point,
     My youth, my hope, my art being all toned down
     To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole. 
     There’s the bell clinking from the chapel-top;
     That length of convent-wall across the way
     Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside;
     The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease,
     And autumn grows, autumn in everything. 
     Eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape,
     As if I saw alike my work and self
     And all that I was born to be and do,
     A twilight piece.  Love, we are in God’s hand. 
     How strange now looks the life he makes us lead;
     So free we seem, so fettered fast we are! 
     I feel he laid the fetter:  let it lie! 
     This chamber, for example—­turn your head—­
     All that’s behind us!  You don’t understand
     Nor care to understand about my art,
     But you can hear at least when people speak: 
     And that cartoon, the second from the door—­
     It is the thing, Love! so such things should be;
     Behold Madonna!—­I am bold to say,
     I can do with my pencil what I know,
     What I see, what at bottom of my heart
     I wish for, if I ever wish so deep—­
     Do easily, too—­when I say perfectly,
     I do not boast, perhaps:  yourself are judge,
     Who listened to the Legate’s talk last week;
     And just as much they used to say in France,
     At any rate ’tis easy, all of it! 
     No sketches first, no studies, that’s long past: 
     I do what many dream of, all their lives—­
     Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,
     And fail in doing.