THE WALK.

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.

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.

No, no!

We live in verse, for all things rhyme

With something out of space and time.

But in the suburb here life needs must flow

In journalistic prose...

But we have set

Our faces towards the further hills, where yet

The wind untainted and unbound may blow.