A game of chess

A GAME OF CHESS

The silent moves, the gently shaded room:

It is like childhood once again when I

Sat with a tray of toys and you would come

To take my temperature and make me lie

Under the clothes and sleep. Now peacefully

We sit above the intellectual game.

Pure mathematics seem to rule the board.

Emotionless. And yet I feel the same

\as when I sat and played without a word

Inventing kingdoms where great feelings stirred.

Is it that knight and king and small squat castle

Store up emotion, bring it under rule,

So that the problems now with which we wrestle

Seem simply of the mind? Do feelings cool

Beneath the order of an abstract school?

Never entirely, since the whole thing brings

Me back to childhood when I was distressed:

You seem the same who put away my things

At night: my toys and tools of childish lust.

My king is caught now in a world of trust.