Oft as I come, the hateful garden-row Of ruined roses hanging from the stem, Where winds of old defeat yet batter them, Infects me: suddenly must I depart, Ere thought of men’s injustice then and now Add to these aisles one other broken heart.
A WOOF reversed the fatal shuttles weave, How slow! but never once they slip the thread. Hither, upon the Georgian idlers’ tread, Up spacious ways the lindens interleave, Clouding the royal air since yester-eve, Come men bereft of time and scant of bread, Loud, who were dumb, immortal, who were dead, Thro’ the cowed world their kingdom to retrieve.
What ails thee, England? Altar, mart, and grange Dream of the knife by night; not so, not so The clear Republic waits the general throe, Along her noonday mountains’ open range. God be with both! for one is young to know The other’s rote of evil and of change.
THE cry is at thy gates, thou darling ground, Again; for oft ere now thy children went Beggared and wroth, and parting greeting sent Some red old alley with a dial crowned; Some house of honor, in a glory bound With lives and deaths of spirits excellent; Some tree rude-taken from his kingly tent Hard by a little fountain’s friendly sound.
O for Virginius’ hand, if only that Maintain the whole, and spoil these spoilings soon! Better the scowling Strand should lose, alas, Her peopled oasis, and where it was All mournful in the cleared quadrangle sat Echo, and ivy, and the loitering moon.
THE evenfall, so slow on hills, hath shot Far down into the valley’s cold extreme, Untimely midnight; spire and roof and stream Like fleeing spectres, shudder and are not. The Hampstead hollies, from their sylvan plot Yet cloudless, lean to watch as in a dream, From chaos climb with many a sudden gleam, London, one moment fallen and forgot.
Her booths begin to flare; and gases bright Prick door and window; all her streets obscure Sparkle and swarm with nothing true nor sure, Full as a marsh of mist and winking light; Heaven thickens over, Heaven that cannot cure Her tear by day, her fevered smile by night.
AH, if man’s boast and man’s advance be vain, And yonder bells of Bow, loud-echoing home, And the lone Tree foreknow it, and the Dome, The monstrous island of the middle main; If each inheritor must sink again Under his sires, as falleth where it clomb Back on the gone wave the disheartened foam?-- I crossed Cheapside, and this was in my brain.