MUSEUM
The day was death. A chalk road, pale in dust,
Accused with leprous finger the long moors.
The drab, damp air so blanketed the town
No doddered oak swung leathern leaf. The chimneys
Pushed oddling pillars at the loose-hung sky.
May, pansy, lilac, dense as the night steam
Of lowland swamps, fettered the sodden air,
And, through the haze, along the ragstone houses,
Blood-lichens dulled to a rotten-apple brown.
Behind close doors pale women drooped and dragged
In customary toils. They dusted shelves
Or changed from chair to chair dull, cotton cushions:
Soon, vacantly, they bore them back and wiped
With languid arms the black, unspotted shelves.
Such mind’s own symbols of despair they went
That never movement shook a face to grief—
At first they looked no more than cheerless women,
But dug deep in the plaster of their flesh
Those eyes were year-dead, underpouched with blue.
A word would sear the silence of a week.
Of a sudden, turning a byeway corner, a cripple,
Bloodless with age, lumbered along the road.
The motes of dust whirled at his iron-shod crutches
And quickly settled. A dog whined. The old
Cripple looked round and saw no man, but gave
A cruel, crackling chuckle, swung a yard,
And stopped to look about and laugh again.
‘That,’ said a girl in a flat voice, ‘is God.’
She turned and slid the table-cover straight.
Her mother could not answer, but she thought
‘It must be Beggar Joe, gone lately mad.’
He lumbered along the road and turned a corner.
His tapping faded and the day was death.
LOST LANDS
When from this alien multitude of man
These, kind or kindred, speak in approbation
Of what I strove to write, for all my pleasure
I feel my gross dismerit and fall shamed.
Set no regard on me: not I can pierce
Clogged air and homely falsehood in prophetic
Dream or sudden awakening. Sinewed phrases,
There are my petty troublings of weak sight.
Shame took me once, and shame has tracked me since:
My friend spoke of a man who lives bewildered,
Even in London striding over mountains,
Through populous roads companioning the dead.
Stars move around him and the dew falls grey;
Thin firs pry through the mist. Old fables quicken—
Undine laughs by the waters, vague, uneasy:
Maiden Mary sings to the sleepy Child.
Then I remembered boyhood, in whose hours
Thistles were knights, old men were murderous, daytime
Intractable as dream. I knew that either
Hid with coarse walls imaginable worlds.
Now I am dulled, habitual now with known
Earth. Never shall other-country pathways
Bring me, familiar, through amazing valleys
Fire-white with blossom, dark with ancient boughs.