But man's forever drifting will
Again took hold of him—again
The fashionable quarter shifted: soon,
Before some plastering had dried,
Society packed up, went away.
Now, could you see these houses,
You would not think they ever had a prime:
A grim four-storied serried row
Of rooms to let—at any time
Tenants are moving in or out.
Families drifting down or struggling still
To keep their heads up and not drown.
A tragic busy pettiness
Has settled on them all,
But one.
And in that one, when I came here,
A family lived, but with its trunks packed up,
And now that family's gone.
Its shutterless blindless windows let you look inside
And see the sunlight chequering the bare floor
With patterns from the window-frames
All day.
Its backyard neatly swept,
Contains no crammed ash-barrels and no lines
For clothes to flap about on;
It does not look by day as if it had
Ever a living soul beneath its roof.
It seems to mark a gap in the grim line,
No house at all, but an unfinished shell.
But when the windows up and down those faces
With yellow glimmer of gas, blaze forth;
I know it is the only house that lives
In all that grim four-storied row.
The others are mere shelves, overcrowded layers,
Of warring, separate personalities;
A jangle and a tangle of emotions,
Without a single meaning running through them;
But it, the empty house, has mastered all its secrets.
Behind its silent swarthy face,
Eyelessly proud,
It watches, it is master;
It sees the other houses still incessantly learning
The lesson it remembers,
And which it can repeat the last dim syllable of.
THE SKATERS
To A. D. R.
Black swallows swooping or gliding
In a flurry of entangled loops and curves;
The skaters skim over the frozen river.
And the grinding click of their skates as they impinge upon the surface,
Is like the brushing together of thin wing-tips of silver.
F. S. FLINT
EASTER
Friend
we will take the path that leads
down from the flagstaff by the pond
through the gorse thickets;
see, the golden spikes have thrust their points through,
and last year's bracken lies yellow-brown and trampled.
The sapling birch-groves have shown no leaf,
and the wistarias on the desolate pergola
are shorn and ashen.
We lurch on, and, stumbling,
touch each other.
You do not shrink, friend.
There you, and I here,
side by side, we go, jesting.
We do not seek, we do not avoid, contact.
Here is the road,
with the budding elm-trees lining it,
and there the low gate in the wall;
on the other side, the people.
Are they not aliens? You and I for a moment see them
shabby of limb and soul,
patched up to make shift.
We laugh and strengthen each other;
But the evil is done.