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THE WALK. I. THROUGH THE SUBURBS. Provincial Sunday broods above the town: The street's asleep; through a dim window drifts A small romance that hiccoughs up and down An air all trills and runs and sudden lifts To yearning sevenths poised ... not Chopin quite, But, oh, romantic; a tinsel world made bright With rose and honeysuckle's paper blooms, And where the moon's blue limelight and the glooms Of last-act scenes of passion are discreet. And when the tinkling stops and leaves the street Blank in the sunlight of the afternoon You feel a curtain dropped. Poor little tune! Perhaps our grandmother's dull girlhood days Were fired by you with radiances of pink, Heavenly, brighter far than she could think Anything might be ... till a greater blaze Tinged life's horizon, when he kissed her first, Our grandpapa. But a thin ghost still plays In music down the street, echoing the plaint Of far romance with its own sadder song Of Everyday; and as they walk along,... The young man and the woman, deep immersed In all the suburb-comedy around ... They seem to catch coherence in the sound Of that ghost-music, and the words come faint:— Oh the months and the days, Oh sleeps and dinners, Oh the planning of ways And quotidian means! Oh endless vistas of mutton and greens, Oh weekly mimblings of prayer and praise, Oh Evenings with All the Winners! Monday sends the clothes to the wash And Saturday brings them home again: Mon Dieu, la vie est par trop moche And Destiny is a sale caboche; But I'll give you heaven In a dominant seven, And you shall not have lived in vain. "In vain," the girl repeats, "in vain, in vain ..." Your suburb's whole philosophy leads there. The ox-stall for our happiness, for pain, Poignant and sweet, the dull narcotic ache Of wretchedness, and in resigned despair A grim contentment ... ashen fruits to slake A nameless, quenchless thirst. The tinkling rain Of that small sentimental music wets Your parching suburb: it may sprout ... who knows?... In something red and silken like a rose, In sheaves of almost genuine violets. Faint chords, your sadness, secular, immense, Brims to the bursting this poor Actual heart. For surging through the floodgates that the sense On sudden lightly opens sweeps the Whole Into the narrow compass of its part. He. Inedited sensation of the soul! You'd have us bless the Hire-Purchase System, Which now allows the poorest vampers To feel, as they abuse their piano's dampers, That angels have stooped down and kissed 'em With Ave-Maries from the infinite. But poor old Infinite's dead. Long live his heir, Lord Here-and-Now ... for all the rest Is windy nothingness, or at the best Home-made Chimera, bodied with despair, Headed with formless, foolish hope. She. No, no! We live in verse, for all things rhyme With something out of space and time. He. But in the suburb here life needs must flow In journalistic prose ... She. But we have set Our faces towards the further hills, where yet The wind untainted and unbound may blow. II. FROM THE CREST. So through the squalor, till the sky unfolds To right and left its fringes, penned no more, A thin canal, 'twixt shore and ugly shore Of hovels, poured contiguous from the moulds Of Gothic horror. Town is left at last, Save for the tentacles that probe,... a squat Dun house or two, allotments, plot on plot Of cabbage, jejune, ripe or passed, Chequering with sick yellow or verdigris The necropolitan ground; and neat paved ways That edge the road ... the town's last nerves ... and cease, As if in sudden shame, where hedges raise Their dusty greenery on either hand. Their path mounts slowly up the hill; And, as they walk, to right and left expand The plain and the golden uplands and the blue Faint smoke of distances that fade from view; And at their feet, remote and still? The city spreads itself. He. That glabrous dome that lifts itself so grand, There in the marish, is the omphalos, The navel, umbo, middle, central boss Of the unique, sole, true Cloud-Cuckoo Land. Drowsy with Sunday bells and Sunday beer Afoam in silver rumkins, there it basks, Thinking of labours past and future tasks And pondering on the end, forever near, Yet ever distant as the rainbow's spring. For still in Cuckoo-Land they're labouring, With hopes undamped and undiscouraged hearts: A little musty, but superb, they sit, Piecing a god together bit by bit Out of the chaos of his sundered parts. Unmoved, nay pitying, they view the grins And lewd grimaces of the folk that jeer ... The vulgar herd, gross monster at the best, Obscenum Mobile, the uttermost sphere, Alas, too much the mover of the rest, Though they turn sungates to its widdershins ... And in some half a million years perhaps God may at last be made ... a new, true Pan, An Isis templed in the soul of man, An Aphrodite with her thousand paps Streaming eternal wisdom. Yes, and man's vessel, all pavilioned out With silk and flags in the fair wind astream, Shall make the port at last, with a great shout Ringing from all her decks, and rocking there shall dream For ever, and dream true ... calm in those roads As lovers' souls at evening, when they swim Between the despairing sunset and the dim Blue memories of mountains lost to sight But, like half fancied, half remembered episodes Of childhood, guessed at through the veils of night. And the worn sailors at the mast who heard The first far bells and knew the sound for home, Who marked the land-weeds and the sand-stained foam And through the storm-blast saw a wildered bird Seek refuge at the mast-head ... these at last Shall earn due praise when all the hubbub's past; And Cuckoo-Landers not a few shall prove. She. You have fast closed the temple gates; You stand without in the noon-tides glow, But the innermost darkness, where God waits, You do not know, you cannot know. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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