Poems (Craik)/My Friend
MY FRIEND.
Friend wears a cheerful smile of his own, And a musical tongue has he; We sit and look in each other's face, And are very good company. A heart he has, full warm and red As ever a heart I see; And as long as I keep true to him, Why, he 'll keep true to me. When the wind blows high and the snow falls fast And we hear the wassailers' roar—My Friend and I, with a right good-will We bolt the chamber door: I smile at him and he smiles at me In a dreamy calm profound, Till his heart leaps up in the midst of him With a comfortable sound.
His warm breath kisses my thin gray hair And reddens my ashen cheeks; He knows me better than you all know, Though never a word he speaks:—Knows me as well as some had known Were things—not as things be. But hey, what matters? my Friend and I Are capital company.
At dead of night, when the house is still, He opens his pictures fair: Faces that are, that used to be, And faces that never were: My wife sits sewing beside my hearth, My little ones frolic wild, Though—Lillian 's married these twenty years, And I never had a child.
But hey, what matters? when those who laugh May weep to-morrow, and they Who weep be as those that wept not—all Their tears long wiped away. I shall burn out, like you, my Friend, With a bright warm heart and bold, That flickers up to the last—then drops Into quiet ashes cold.
And when you flicker on me, old Friend, In the old man's elbow-chair, Or—something easier still, where we Lie down, to arise up fair And young, and happy—why then, my Friend, Should other friends ask of me, Tell them I lived and loved and died In the best of all company.