The God of the Gardens, V

How cold! The vines with frost are glittering;
The sun I watch for, knowing the time exact
When dawn red tints Soracte's snows. Distract
Is rural God—man's so perverse a thing.

For twenty winters, lonely, shivering,
In this old close I've lived. My beard's compact,
My paint scales off, my shrunken wood is cracked,
And now the worms may come to gnaw and sting.

Why of Penates am I not, or Lar
Domestic even, retouched, from care afar,
With fruits and honey gorged, or wreathed, as they?

In the fore-court the wax ancestors grace
I should grow old, and on their virile day
The children round my neck their bullae place.