Douceurs, Tristesses 131
nostalgia. The modulation from statement to prophecy is made so
unobtrusively that we scarcely notice it until it has happened:
She gives transparence. But she has grown old.
The necklace is a carving not a kiss.
The soft hands are a motion not a touch.
The house will crumble and the books will burn.
These four symmetrical lines are so tonelessly uttered that the fourth seems
as unarguable, as much a natural fact, as the preceding three. But the effect
of the intensification into prophecy is to send the mind rapidly back to the
lulling present of the unsuspecting family:
They are at ease in a shelter of the mind
And the house is of the mind and they and time,
Together, all together.
The prophecy reappears, but in a softened rephrasing, first in the deceptive
appearance of the approaching consuming fire:
Boreal night
Will look like frost as it approaches them
And to the mother as she falls asleep
And as they say good-night, good-night.
And the inevitable extinction of the family is announced in a sinister but
understated mention of the extinguished lights in the bedchambers, lit now
only by the flaring auroras outside:
Upstairs
The windows will be lighted, not the rooms.
Finally, though, these mitigations and evasions give way to the peremptory doom:
The wind will spread its windy grandeurs round
And knock like a rifle-butt against the door.
The wind will command them with invincible sound.