Dim Lamps

If a hundred million ladies whom I know

Each carried a dim lamp wearily in a cypress-bordered lane,

Ever so long ago, if you please,

Before Cromwell was or Michelangelo

Or cypresses as now we have these mournful, weeping trees;

And all these hundred million ladies

With their hundred million souls

Making one soul, one,

Were of Kentucky, Maine or Cedar Springs far away—

Have we, would we have one of the world’s ways,

One, one of the world’s many, many ways.