O gay and passionate, gloomy and serene,
Your quivering fingers laugh and weep and curse
For all the phantoms you have ever been.
Yet would you wish another universe?
Let peace come if it will: your last long note
Dies on the quiet breast of space; and now
They clap: I see again your square frock coat,
Dark, foreign fiddler, you have stopped: you bow.
THE RUGGER MATCH
(OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE—QUEEN'S—DECEMBER)
(To Hugh Brooks)
I
The walls make a funnel, packed full; the distant gate
Bars us from inaccessible light and peace.
Far over necks and ears and hats, I see
Policemen's helmets and cards hung on the ironwork:
"One shilling," "No change given," "Ticket-holders only";
Oh Lord! What an awful crush! There are faces pale
And strained, and faces with animal grins advancing,
Stuck fast around mine. We move, we pause again
For an age, then a forward wave and another stop.
The pressure might squeeze one flat. Dig heels into ground
For this white and terrified woman whose male insists
Upon room to get back. Why didn't I come here at one?
Why come here at all? What strange little creatures we are,
Wedged and shoving under the contemptuous sky!
All things have stopped; the time will never go by;
We shall never get in! ... Yet through the standing glass
The sand imperceptible drops, the inexorable laws
Of number work also here. They are passing and passing,
I can hear the tick of the turnstiles, tick, tick, tick,
A man, a woman, a man, shreds of the crowd,
A man, a man, till the vortex sucks me in
And, squeezed between strangers hurting the flat of my arms,
I am jetted forth, and pay my shilling, and pass
To freedom and space, and a cool for the matted brows.
But we cannot rest yet. Fast from the gates we issue,
Spread conelike out, a crowd of loosening tissue,
All jigging on, and making as we travel
"Pod, pod" of feet on earth, "chix, chix" on gravel.
Heads forward, striding eagerly, we keep
Round to the left in semi-circular sweep
By the back of a stand, excluded, noting the row
Of heads that speck the top, and, caverned below,
The raw, rough, timber back of the new-made mound.
Quicker! The place is swarming! Around, around
Till the edge is reached, and we see a patch of green,
Two masts with a crossbar, tapering, white and clean,
And confluent rows of people that merge and die
In a flutter of faces where the grand-stand blocks the sky.
We hurry along, past ragged files of faces,
Flushing and quick, peering for empty places.
I see one above me, I step and prise and climb,
And stand and turn and breathe and look at the time,
Survey the field, and note with superior glance,
The anxious bobbing fools who still advance.