After the Memorial Service

'And thou hast climb'd the hill,
And gain'd the white brow of the Cumner range'
                                   Matthew Arnold, 'The Scholar-Gipsy'

Perhaps always an habitueé of fey Christendom...
her late poems sometimes tilt
to the mystic, where I doubt I could ever

in a hundred years, stand? I recollect
the affectations of three decades ago
that charmed me, drawing breath then

if dumbly. My first Michaelmas term,
I looked over her fair-hair-draggled, third-year shoulder
at her MS. poem, shared with some inamorato:
her hand, with lofty upper cases,
limned to the ragged sheet's foot.
...