LONDON

Richer than fields of corn that fire in summer,

Strange as the moon on forest rising sudden,

More fearful and beloved than peace or silence,

Heart with my heart at pace in throbbing fever,

Calling towards me with a voice incessant.

Thou that begot me: From whose streets triumphant

I, coloured fiercely with thy passion, wakened!

I sucked red wine, not milk, from thy gaunt bosom,

My senses in thy fearfulness found beauty,

And honey in thine oaths and lamentations.

I played about thy feet that know not resting

And bathed me in the sweat of thine endeavour.

When on thy gala-nights the thronged lamps glitter,

Sparkle like sequins, and the plumes of shadow

With curling smoke, with rain and rippling gutter

Are tossed in feathered gaiety about thee —

Thick grow the crowded streets in coloured pageant,

Kaleidoscope of people, circling, crossing,

Till the brain frenzies to a thousand patterns,

While the ears buzz with noises of their laughter;

Shouts hoarse and coarse and shrill in one great roaring,

As of the angry ocean in her travail...

They haunt me in the tranquil of the forest,

Those faces pain has marked and toil has mangled;

Pangs greater than the lonely Crucifixion

Here crucified each day with lust and hunger,

Hung up unlovely in the open market;

Made gay with paper garlands, covered over

With tinsel loincloth, painted like a puppet,

Lest the elect in passing should be startled,

Lest they should smear the blameless brow of honour!

With bloody shoes and spinning-wheels of traffic

Vermilion-splashed, the city rushes onward,

And thorns of death and lust and fruitless labour

Lie underneath the feet forever dancing.

Gay tunes are rasped upon a weary fiddle,

Or voice of moaning in the tinkling cymbal,

Offspring of humour from disaster's bowels.

I love the bitter and the rude, the drunken,

The tramps and thieves that skulk among the shadows;

The faces red as fire and dead as ashes,

A million faces scattered like confetti,

All changing, whirling, trodden into nothing.

There Beauty wanders strange, an-hungered, weary,

Throned on a dust-heap, or triumphant reeling

In mad disorder from the couch of chaos.

O ragged Beauty, through the mournful houses,

How frail the feet that lead the dawn towards us,

Blushed in the sunrise with a great ambition,

Spent in the evening like a rose of fever,

Fainting before us paler than a lily.

While here each day self-satisfied and placid

Moves opulent among the groves of summer;

The larks delight, the laughter of the thrushes,

The kindly peasants in their ruddy orchard,

Please for a while until the spirit sickens

And turns her panting to her ancient lover.

Oh, well I know the quickening of the pulses,

Joy bursting through disgust as field and pasture

Grow fewer, paler, till the eager houses

Like hungry animals eat up the spaces

And close upon the miles that God created,

With triumph of man's greed. As warriors listening

To the far rhythm in the drums of battle,

As seamen hear the mighty tide-wave bursting,

I feel the scamper of your feet approaching

And your great starving arms and strangling fingers

That drag me back to my perverted Heaven!