THE DEAD TREE.
(Being a terrible result of reading too much poetry in the modern manner.)
Slushy is the highway between the unspeakable hedges;
I pause
Irresolute under a telegraph-pole,
The fourteenth telegraph-pole on the way
From Shere to Havering,
The twenty-first
From Havering to Shere.
Crimson is the western sky; upright it stands,
The solitary pole,
Sombre and terrible,
Splitting the dying sun
Into two semi-circular halves.
I do not think I have seen, not even in Vorticist pictures,
Anything so solitary,
So absolutely nude;
Yet this was an item once in the uninteresting forest,
With branches sticking out of it, and crude green leaves
And resinous sap,
And underneath it a litter of pine spindles
And ants;
Birds fretted in the boughs and bees were busy in it,
Squirrels ran noisily up it;
Now it is naked and dead,
Delightfully naked
And beautifully dead.
Delightfully and beautifully, for across it melodiously,
Stirred by the evening wind,
The wires where electric messages are continually being despatched
Between various post-offices,
Messages of business and messages of love,
Rates of advertisements and all the winners,
Are vibrating and thrumming
Like a thousand lutes.
Is the old grey heart of the telegraph pole stirred by these messages?
I fancy not.
Yet it all seems very strange;
And even stranger still, now that I notice it,
Is the fact that the thing is after all not absolutely naked,
For a short way up it, half obliterated with age,
Discoloured and torn,
Fastened on by tintacks,
There is a paper affiche
Relating to swine fever.
The sun sinks lower and I pass on,
On to the fifteenth pole from Shere to Havering,
And the twentieth
From Havering to Shere;
It is even more naked and desolate than the last.
I pause (as before)....
[Author. We can start all over again now if you like. Editor. I don't like.]
Evoe.
"HOPS.
Canterbury, Saturday.—Trade was quiet, with prices steady, as follows:—Kent mixed fleeces, 36d; lambs' wool, 22d to 24d; downs, 41d to 42d; and half-bred fleeces, 38d to 39d per lb."—Financial Paper.
This may help to explain the taste of "Government ale."
"By systematic and scientific training is it possible to produce that perfect type of manhood gifted with the best powers of what we are wont to call the 'lower orders of creation'—keen sighted and swift of motion as a bird, sharp-scented as a greyhound, faithful and acute as a dog, and full of sentient wisdom as an elephant."—Daily Paper.
We are doubtful about the rest, but the greyhound part should be quite easy.
