For Pity, Not for Love
Clark Ashton SmithFor pity, not for love (Because you loved me so) With undesirous lips I kissed you long ago. You were not over-fair; And surely it is strange Your memory should return, Touched with this fairer change. For now at whiles I meet In eves of weariness Your sweetly watchful eyes That know my still distress; And turn to feel your lips Laid soothly on my hair— Your half-forgotten lips, Grown strangely dear and fair. Who knows?—if you should come This shifting heart to prove, Yours might the pity be, And mine the pitied love.
A quietly brave poem. The speaker admits something unflattering: they kissed someone out of pity, not love. But now this person keeps appearing in tired evenings, and in memory they have become something they weren’t quite in life — softer, dearer, fairer. The imagination has been quietly working on them. This is the stranger feeling of discovering, too late, that absence has transformed someone you did not fully value.