Dinah Maria Craik

My Friend

MY 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—Lilian’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.