id="pgepubid00086"> IN THE THEATRE

Darkness in the theatre:
Darkness and a multitude
Assembled in the darkness.
These who every day perform
The unique tragi-comedy
Of birth and death;
Now press upon each other,
Directing the irresistible weight of their thoughts to the stage.

A great broad shaft of calcium light
Cleaves, like a stroke of a sword, the darkness:
And, at the end of it,
A tiny spot which is the red nose of a comedian
Marks the goal of the spot-light and the eyes which people the darkness.

SHIPS IN THE HARBOUR

Like a flock of great blue cranes
Resting upon the water,
The ships assemble at morning, when the grey light wakes in the east.

Weary, no longer flying,
Over the hissing spindrift, through the ravelled clutching sea;
No longer over the tops of the waves spinning along north-eastward,
In a great irregular wedge before the trade-wind far from land.

But drowsy, mournful, silent,
Yet under their bulged projecting bows runs the silver foam of the sunlight,
And rebelliously they shake out their plumage of sails, wet and heavy with the rain.

THE EMPTY HOUSE

Out from my window-sill I lean,
And see a straight four-storied row
Of houses.

Once, long ago,
These had their glory: they were built
In the fair palmy days before
The Civil War when all the seas
Saw the white sails of Yankee ships
Scurrying home with spice and gold.
And many of these houses hung
Proud wisps of crêpe upon their doors
On hearing that some son had died
At Chancellorsville or Fredericksburg,
Their offering to the Union side.

But man's forever drifting will
Again took hold of him—again
The fashionable quarter shifted: soon,
Before some plastering had dried,
Society packed up, went away.
Now, could you see these houses,
You would not think they ever had a prime:
A grim four-storied serried row
Of rooms to let—at any time
Tenants are moving in or out.
Families drifting down or struggling still
To keep their heads up and not drown.
A tragic busy pettiness
Has settled on them all,
But one.
And in that one, when I came here,
A family lived, but with its trunks packed up,
And now that family's gone.

Its shutterless blindless windows let you look inside
And see the sunlight chequering the bare floor
With patterns from the window-frames
All day.
Its backyard neatly swept,
Contains no crammed ash-barrels and no lines
For clothes to flap about on;
It does not look by day as if it had
Ever a living soul beneath its roof.
It seems to mark a gap in the grim line,
No house at all, but an unfinished shell.

But when the windows up and down those faces
With yellow glimmer of gas, blaze forth;
I know it is the only house that lives
In all that grim four-storied row.
The others are mere shelves, overcrowded layers,
Of warring, separate personalities;
A jangle and a tangle of emotions,
Without a single meaning running through them;
But it, the empty house, has mastered all its secrets.
Behind its silent swarthy face,
Eyelessly proud,
It watches, it is master;
It sees the other houses still incessantly learning
The lesson it remembers,
And which it can repeat the last dim syllable of.

THE SKATERS

To A. D. R.

Black swallows swooping or gliding
In a flurry of entangled loops and curves;
The skaters skim over the frozen river.
And the grinding click of their skates as they impinge upon the surface,
Is like the brushing together of thin wing-tips of silver.

F. S. FLINT

EASTER

Friend
we will take the path that leads
down from the flagstaff by the pond
through the gorse thickets;
see, the golden spikes have thrust their points through,
and last year's bracken lies yellow-brown and trampled.
The sapling birch-groves have shown no leaf,
and the wistarias on the desolate pergola
are shorn and ashen.
We lurch on, and, stumbling,
touch each other.
You do not shrink, friend.
There you, and I here,
side by side, we go, jesting.
We do not seek, we do not avoid, contact.

Here is the road,
with the budding elm-trees lining it,
and there the low gate in the wall;
on the other side, the people.
Are they not aliens? You and I for a moment see them
shabby of limb and soul,
patched up to make shift.
We laugh and strengthen each other;
But the evil is done.

Is not the whole park made for them,
and the bushes and plants and trees and grasses,
have they not grown to their standard?
The paths are worn to the gravel with their feet;
the green moss will not carpet them.
The flags of the stone steps are hollowed;
and you and I must strive to remain two
and not to merge in the multitude.
It impinges on us; it separates us;
we shrink from it; we brave through it;
we laugh; we jest; we jeer;
and we save the fragments of our souls.

Between two clipped privet hedges now;
we will close our eyes for life's sake
to life's patches.
Here, maybe, there is quiet;
pass first under the bare branches,
beyond is a pool flanked with sedge,
and a swan among water-lilies.
But here too is a group
of men and women and children;
and the swan has forgotten its pride;
it thrusts its white neck among them,
and gobbles at nothing;
then tires of the cheat and sails off;
but its breast urges before it
a sheet of sodden newspaper
that, drifting away,
reveals beneath the immaculate white splendour
of its neck and wings
a breast black with scum.

Friend, we are beaten.

OGRE

Through the open window can be seen
the poplars at the end of the garden
shaking in the wind,
a wall of green leaves so high
that the sky is shut off.

On the white table-cloth
a rose in a vase
—centre of a sphere of odour—
contemplates the crumbs and crusts
left from a meal:
cups, saucers, plates lie
here and there.

And a sparrow flies by the open window,
stops for a moment,
flutters his wings rapidly,
and climbs an aerial ladder