Explore "The Old School-Chum" by James Whitcomb Riley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
He puts the poem by, to say / His eyes are not themselves to-day!
A sudden glamour o'er his sight -- / A something vague, indefinite --
An oft-recurring blur that blinds / The printed meaning of the lines,
And leaves the mind all dusk and dim / In swimming darkness -- strange to him!
It is not childishness, I guess, -- / Yet something of the tenderness
That used to wet his lashes when / A boy seems troubling him again; --
The old emotion, sweet and wild, / That drove him truant when a child,
That he might hide the tears that fell / Above the lesson -- "Little Nell."
And so it is he puts aside / The poem he has vainly tried
To follow; and, as one who sighs / In failure, through a poor disguise
Of smiles, he dries his tears, to say / His eyes are not themselves to-day.