A LONDON INVOLUNTARY

Old Palace Yard!

Hark how their breath draws lank and hard,

The sallow stern police!

Breaking the desultory midnight peace

With plangent call, to cry

‘ Division’! This their first especial charge.

And now, low, luminous, and large,

The slumbrous Member hurries by.

Let us take cab, Dear Heart, take cab and go

From out the lith of this loud world ( I know

The meaning of the word ). Come, let us hie

To where the lamp-posts ouch the troubled sky,—

( And if there is one thing for which I vouch

It is my knowledge of the verb to ouch. )

So, as we steal

Homeward together, we shall feel

The buxom breeze,—

( Observe the epithet; an apt one, if you please. )

Down through the sober paven street,

Which, purged and sweet,

Gleams in the ambient deluge of the water-cart,

Bemused and blurred and pinkly lustrous, where

The blandest lion in Trafalgar Square

Seems but a part

Of the great continent of light,—

An attribute of the embittered night,—

How new, how naked and how clean!

Couchant, slow, shimmering, superb!

Constant to one environment, nor even seen

Pottering aimlessly along the kerb.

Lo!

On the pavement, one of those

Grim men who go down to the sea in ships,

Blaspheming, reeling in a foul ellipse,

Home to some tangled alley-bedside goes,—

Oozing and flushed, sharing his elemental mirth

With all the jocund undissembling earth;

Drooping his shameless nose,

Nor hitching up his drifting, shifting clothes.

And here is Piccadilly! Loudly dense,

Intractable, voluminous, immense!

( Dear, dear my heart's desire, can I be talking sense? )