The melancholy verse Sings to the waterfall; Wring writing harsh and worse, The jarring beauties fall.
Throw in your reserves, The roughest hold of the brain, And Hopkin's line serves To mitigate our pain.
The torture and the storm, Love, revolt, defeat, In the aptly-turning form Felicitously meet.
Keat's ghost walks; Pains no line can catch Escape the language that the poet talks, Nor meet the misery in a perfect match.
So I shall never in verse put downThe wringing horror of this town,A vision hard to repeatOf a long unhappy street.
Your hands look chafed and torn,Your face is greyed and worn,Unhappier those eyes:I think now how days pressWith hard events and emptiness,Cook and clean, carpets to shake,Rooms to dust, beds to make,No time, no space,They change a face.
We are half young-- our sentences run onFor unknown lengths still--we must settle down,Grow more used to this lonely town,Work, wash, sew, mend,With no assurance of an end;So all others live, and weShall not miss their certainty.
The lost battle, the long defeat,Shine with forked lightening: unhappiness in loveMarches excitement : there lives change or move,Not like the slow depression of the street.
Verse tinkles waterfalls; I thought of the fallingOf blocks of dry, rough stone; of coarse large coke;With a dry noise, heavy cataracts pouringOn numbed grey fingers, cleaned where the skin broke;Before the pink-white tear caked dust-blood black;And the slithering fall of stuff to be pushed back.
In town there is only the sky: I looked up there,Saw wind and whirl of gulls and of clouds in air,An answering image of you; the swirling, highGrace of flight, and the tumult of the sky:I have always thought of you with birds and windAs a match to your rapid beauty and distant mind,As I have always loved the plough and down.Now we must lead the long lives of this town,Daily work for daily breadUntil we win fame or an old age pensionOr get shot down in a revolution:I prefer absence and treesTo the choice I make of these.No help now: this town could doWith some poison gas and a bomb or two.
