Month by month on the airy platforms
Workmen labour’d hacking and hoisting
Till again the tower was stript to the sun:
The old tow’r? Nay a new tow’r stood there
From footing to battlemented skyline
And topt with a cap the slice of a cone
Archæologic and counterfeited
The smoothest thing in all the high-street
As Eton scholars to-day may see:
They—wherever else they find their wonder
And feed their boyhood on Time’s enchantment—
See never the Tow’r that spoke to me.
FLYCATCHERS.
Sweet pretty fledgelings, perched on the rail arow,
Expectantly happy, where ye can watch below
Your parents a-hunting i’ the meadow grasses
All the gay morning to feed you with flies;
Ye recall me a time sixty summers ago,
When, a young chubby chap, I sat just so
With others on a school-form rank’d in a row,
Not less eager and hungry than you, I trow,
With intelligences agape and eyes aglow,
While an authoritative old wise-acre
Stood over us and from a desk fed us with flies.
Dead flies—such as litter the library south-window,
That buzzed at the panes until they fell stiff-baked on the sill,
Or are roll’d up asleep i’ the blinds at sunrise,
Or wafer’d flat in a shrunken folio.
A dry biped he was, nurtured likewise
On skins and skeletons, stale from top to toe
With all manner of rubbish and all manner of lies.