WINTER NIGHTFALL

The old yellow stucco

Of the time of the Regent

Is flaking and peeling:

The rows of square windows

In the straight yellow building

Are empty and still;

And the dusty dark evergreens

Guarding the wicket

Are draped with wet cobwebs,

And above this poor wilderness

Toneless and sombre

Is the flat of the hill.

They said that a colonel

Who long ago died here

Was the last one to live here:

An old retired colonel,

Some Fraser or Murray,

I do n't know his name;

Death came here and summoned him,

And the shells of him vanished

Beyond all speculation;

And silence resumed here,

Silence and emptiness,

And nobody came.

Was it wet when he lived here,

Were the skies dun and hurrying,

Was the rain so irresolute?

Did he watch the night coming,

Did he shiver at nightfall

Before he was dead?

Did the wind go so creepily,

Chilly and puffing,

With drops of cold rain in it?

Was the hill's lifted shoulder

So lowering and menacing,

So dark and so dread?

Did he turn through his doorway

And go to his study,

And light many candles?

And fold in the shutters,

And heap up the fireplace

To fight off the damps?

And muse on his boyhood,

And wonder if India

Ever was real?

And shut out the loneliness

With pig-sticking memoirs

And collections of stamps?

Perhaps. But he's gone now,

He and his furniture

Dispersed now for ever;

And the last of his trophies,

Antlers and photographs,

Heaven knows where.

And there's grass in his gateway,

Grass on his footpath,

Grass on his door-step;

The garden's grown over,

The well-chain is broken,

The windows are bare.

And I leave him behind me,

For the straggling, discoloured

Rags of the daylight,

And hills and stone walls

And a rick long forgotten

Of blackening hay:

The road pale and sticky,

And cart-ruts and nail marks,

And wind-ruffled puddles,

And the slop of my footsteps

In this desolate country's

Cadaverous clay.