Sword Blades and Poppy Seed | Page 6

tiger-lily petals,
The loud pink of bursting
hydrangeas.
I followed,
And watched for the flashing of her wings.

In the city I found her,
The narrow-streeted city.
In the
market-place I came upon her,
Bound and trembling.
Her fluted
wings were fastened 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,