Nuremberg

So quiet it was in that high, sun-steeped room,

So warm and still, that sometimes with the light

Through the great windows, bright with bottle-panes,

There’d float a chime from clock-jacks out of sight,

    Clapping iron mallets on green copper gongs.

But only in blown music from the town’s

Quaint horologe could Time intrude . . . you’d say

Clocks had been bolted out, the flux of years

Defied, and that high chamber sealed away

    From earthly change by some old alchemist.

And, oh, those thousand towers of Nuremberg

Flowering like leaden trees outside the panes:

Those gabled roofs with smoking cowls, and those

Encrusted spires of stone, those golden vanes

    On shining housetops paved with scarlet tiles!

And all day nine wrought-pewter manticores

Blinked from their spouting faucets, not five steps

Across the cobbled street, or, peering through

The rounds of glass, espied that sun-flushed room

    With Dürer graving at intaglios.

O happy nine, spouting your dew all day

In green-scaled rows of metal, whilst the town

Moves peacefully below in quiet joy . . .

O happy gargoyles to be gazing down

    On Albrecht Dürer and his plates of iron!