Sword Blades and Poppy Seed | Page 6

to her sides with cords,?She was naked and cold,?For that day the wind blew?Without sunshine.
Men chaffered for her,?They bargained in silver and gold,?In copper, in wheat,?And called their bids across the market-place.
The Goddess wept.
Hiding my face I fled,?And the grey wind hissed behind me,?Along the narrow streets.
The Precinct. Rochester
The tall yellow hollyhocks stand,?Still and straight,?With their round blossoms spread open,?In the quiet sunshine.?And still is the old Roman wall,?Rough with jagged bits of flint,?And jutting stones,?Old and cragged,?Quite still in its antiquity.?The pear-trees press their branches against it,?And feeling it warm and kindly,?The little pears ripen to yellow and red.?They hang heavy, bursting with juice,?Against the wall.?So old, so still!
The sky is still.?The clouds make no sound?As they slide away?Beyond the Cathedral Tower,?To the river,?And the sea.?It is very quiet,?Very sunny.?The myrtle flowers stretch themselves in the sunshine,?But make no sound.?The roses push their little tendrils up,?And climb higher and higher.?In spots they have climbed over the wall.?But they are very still,?They do not seem to move.?And the old wall carries them?Without effort, and quietly?Ripens and shields the vines and blossoms.
A bird in a plane-tree?Sings a few notes,?Cadenced and perfect?They weave into the silence.?The Cathedral bell knocks,?One, two, three, and again,?And then again.?It is a quiet sound,?Calling to prayer,?Hardly scattering the stillness,?Only making it close in more densely.?The gardener picks ripe gooseberries?For the Dean's supper to-night.?It is very quiet,?Very regulated and mellow.?But the wall is old,?It has known many days.?It is a Roman wall,?Left-over and forgotten.
Beyond the Cathedral Close?Yelp and mutter the discontents of people not mellow,?Not well-regulated.?People who care more for bread than for beauty,?Who would break the tombs of saints,?And give the painted windows of churches?To their children for toys.?People who say:?"They are dead, we live!?The world is for the living."
Fools! It is always the dead who breed.?Crush the ripe fruit, and cast it aside,?Yet its seeds shall fructify,?And trees rise where your huts were standing.?But the little people are ignorant,?They chaffer, and swarm.?They gnaw like rats,?And the foundations of the Cathedral are honeycombed.
The Dean is in the Chapter House;?He is reading the architect's bill?For the completed restoration of the Cathedral.?He will have ripe gooseberries for supper,?And then he will walk up and down the path?By the wall,?And admire the snapdragons and dahlias,?Thinking how quiet and peaceful?The garden is.?The old wall will watch him,?Very quietly and patiently it will watch.?For the wall is old,?It is a Roman wall.
The Cyclists
Spread on the roadway,?With open-blown jackets,?Like black, soaring pinions,?They swoop down the hillside,
The Cyclists.
Seeming dark-plumaged?Birds, after carrion,?Careening and circling,?Over the dying
Of England.
She lies with her bosom?Beneath them, no longer?The Dominant Mother,?The Virile -- but rotting
Before time.
The smell of her, tainted,?Has bitten their nostrils.?Exultant they hover,?And shadow the sun with
Foreboding.
Sunshine through a Cobwebbed Window
What charm is yours, you faded old-world tapestries,?Of outworn, childish mysteries,?Vague pageants woven on a web of dream!?And we, pushing and fighting in the turbid stream?Of modern life, find solace in your tarnished broideries.
Old lichened halls, sun-shaded by huge cedar-trees,?The layered branches horizontal stretched, like Japanese?Dark-banded prints. Carven cathedrals, on a sky?Of faintest colour, where the gothic spires fly?And sway like masts, against a shifting breeze.
Worm-eaten pages, clasped in old brown vellum, shrunk?From over-handling, by some anxious monk.?Or Virgin's Hours, bright with gold and graven?With flowers, and rare birds, and all the Saints of Heaven, And Noah's ark stuck on Ararat, when all the world had sunk.
They soothe us like a song, heard in a garden, sung?By youthful minstrels, on the moonlight flung?In cadences and falls, to ease a queen,?Widowed and childless, cowering in a screen?Of myrtles, whose life hangs with all its threads unstrung.
A London Thoroughfare. 2 A.M.
They have watered the street,?It shines in the glare of lamps,?Cold, white lamps,?And lies?Like a slow-moving river,?Barred with silver and black.?Cabs go down it,?One,?And then another.?Between them I hear the shuffling of feet.?Tramps doze on the window-ledges,?Night-walkers pass along the sidewalks.?The city is squalid and sinister,?With the silver-barred street in the midst,?Slow-moving,?A river leading nowhere.
Opposite my window,?The moon cuts,?Clear and round,?Through the plum-coloured night.?She cannot light the city;?It is too bright.?It has white lamps,?And glitters coldly.
I stand in the window and watch the moon.?She is thin and lustreless,?But I love her.?I know the moon,?And this is an alien city.
Astigmatism
To Ezra Pound
With much friendship and admiration and some differences of opinion
The Poet took his walking-stick?Of fine and polished ebony.?Set in the close-grained wood?Were quaint devices;?Patterns in ambers,?And in the clouded green of jades.?The top was of smooth, yellow ivory,?And a tassel of tarnished gold?Hung by a faded cord from a hole?Pierced in the hard wood,?Circled with silver.?For years the Poet had wrought upon this cane.?His wealth had gone to enrich it,?His experiences to pattern it,?His labour to fashion and burnish it.?To him it was perfect,?A work of art and a weapon,?A delight and a defence.?The Poet took his walking-stick?And walked abroad.
Peace