SUNSET OVER SUBURB
(For Neville Whymant)
The sun setting down the suburb holds
Impermanent crimsons and elusive golds.
See the false banners! folds on magic folds
Sway down deluded streets!
Refuse and ruin now most featly kissed
By lips flushed amethyst!
The walls are shimmered with a vaporous dusk,
A glamour glooms
The sorrowful pale husk
With rich twilight of witchcraft blooms.
Ah! spurious wizardry that flows and fleets
Where sword-gems flash and melt in a moon-mist!
The roofs so ashen-dark of old
Flare down the streets like lifted brands,
Flare like the burning arc of sands
Where the recurrent seas have rolled
Long breakers molten from astounding gold
The chimneys which all day
Scowling have stood
Against the devouring mills,
Boding no thought of good
For whoso came that way—
Lo now! from evil thought
Soaring through steeps of fire their brows are caught.
Columnar topaz in this time of shrift,
Their tall heads lift
Among the bases of celestial hills.
Ah streets, rent roofs, ah chimneys, I am blind!
I dare not find
You lifted so from purgatorial dooms.
I cannot breathe.
Hold me! I sink where the dense colour fumes!
Now opiate hands close round me, draw me down,
Foam-lulled where soundless tides of sunset seethe!
Hold me! I drown!
My eyes open! ah so wretched eyes!
Have ye no gift to steep
Your seeing in swart sleep?
Cannot your harsh lids close
Tighter than midnight knows,
Make sleep a burial whence the last star dies?
Now ebbing like the blood in a faint pulse,
Relentless, with no pause,
Shorn of the lying sapphires, aureate cheats,
The glamorous tide withdraws.
The false sky dulls
From redmost roses into drooping weeds.
Ah dying beauty now that dying bleeds,
Your banners fail in dust!
A slow rot gnaws
The disillusioned roofs with teeth of rust.
Now chimneys reassume
Their ominous dark doom.
Sick grey, sick brown and grey once more are penned
Within the network of the haggard streets.
The suburb stretches drably to life's end!
Like sheep in a mange-ridden flock
Once more the aimless houses sprawl
Along the dishevelled streets,
Where grocers shew their flyblown stock,
Where butchers shew their pulpy meats,
Where down a tin-heaped backyard wall
Thin cats and women call.
As night comes close the suburb flares
To petty sins and cheap carouse
Along its foolish thoroughfares.
The smirking adolescents stand
About the corners in coarse groups.
Somewhere a blind knocks like a hand,
A lodger rings a stuttering bell,
A stray tree mutely droops thin boughs.
A window opening throws a smell
From kitchens where smeared saucepans boil
Their quarts of scurfy soups.
An unlatched door swings wide and wails.
A patch of wilted grass exhales
Scents not of dust nor dustless soil.
For lo! this twofold sorrow was set down
On the doomed suburb till the last of days,
Which hath been placed in intermediate ways
Between two bournes from which her heart is sealed:
The intimate keep of the far midmost town,
The green quick raptures of far outmost field.
She knows not the heart throbbing nor the tense
Roads shimmering where the hundred thousand feet
Make thunders where they meet.
Nor tumult storming in loud sense on sense:
Eyes where the profligate hues
Mingle in whirlpools of untamed delight,
Where scarlet or shrill green pursues
Purples and yellows and star-blues,
And find or lose
Their bodies in white day or profound night;
Smells of strange spices from uncharted lands,
Of blood on unwiped hands,
Of woman's hair, of ripe flamboyant flowers,
Of buildings leaping to the displaced skies,
Of all the body's and soul's mad merchandise
Sold through the crowded unremitting hours;
Sounds of innumerable singings since the dawn
Came dancing and, her gown withdrawn,
Her white breasts blinded night's most impotent eyes;
Cracked murmurs of pale harlots in their beds,
Who have paid more than gold for nothing bought;
The mumbling of old women with drooped heads
Who are defeated though they sternly fought;
Music and terror and the shock of wings!—
Not these she knows—colours and sounds and smells,
The conjoint heavens and the massed hells,
No, not these things!
Not these she knows,—nor these, nor these:
The snowdrops under the dark yews,
The challenge on the young lips borne
Of brave blackthorn
Against the jagged teeth and the harsh beard
Of winter seared.
Nor primroses washed with sweet dews,
Nor daffodils where bees are stuck
Who probe too deeply for their sweet,
Nor celandine whence they refuse
To move until they suck
Their heads drunk and a stupor to their feet.
Ah the dog-violets on low hills
And woodland sorrel in deep woods
And blackbirds with fine yellow bills
And thrushes of a thousand moods
And nesting-time when these make rhyme
Amid the youngling leaves that climb
On sycamores and chestnut trees!
Not these she knows, not these!
She hath not seen the kingfisher
By willowed waters dart blue fires.
She hath not seen the skylark stir
When a sheep's foot came near his nest,
And rise to lead the morning choirs
From flushed East to pale West.
Nor all the blossoms of all fruit,
Apple and pear and rosy peach,
Nor, palisaded from man's reach
Behind a guard of frowning fir,
Wild cherry tipped with dawn.
Nor heard grass-belfries chink and chime
When poplars sway like a slim faun,
Nor known the tardy oak-tree suit
His body to the crescent time.
Not these things and not these she knows
Behind her rampart of pale woes,
For she with twofold grief is sealed
From midmost town and outmost field.
Ah sunset! thou who lying came
To flood her streets with traitor flame,
Come thou no more
With gilded lies!
Her heart is numbed, her eyes are sore,
Her heart is troubled with sick shame.
Open no more
One fitful instant the wild door
Which brought one breeze of Paradise.
In this dun midway where she lies
Each day a twofold death she dies.
Thou false and lovely, come no more
With warm wings touched of Paradise!