Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE DESERTED FACTORY, by JOHN GOULD FLETCHER



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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE DESERTED FACTORY, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: It stands apart, forlorn, grotesque, immense
Last Line: Amid the dust once stirred by workmen's feet.
Subject(s): Factories; London


IT stands apart, forlorn, grotesque, immense;
Bearing no trace of that magnificence
Of fury, toil, and flame which it once wore
Day after day, a few brief years before:
Windows show shattered glass, holes gape in wall;
Askew, a smoke-grimed chimney threatens fall.
Around it stretch the marshy flats, the red
River amid them crumpled like the dead
Arm of a drowned man stretched from shallow grave
Amid brown shingle wetted by the wave.
Now, to this shell the city's life is naught
But desolate distant murmurs, vaguely brought
From the horizon-edge where steadily loom
Above their flame-shot drifting smoke and gloom,
Like battle-towers of a besieging host,
The chimneys, from whose heads the smoke is tossed
All through the day, in columns mounting high.
Throughout the night, flame signals flare in sky,
But waken not this ruin huge and cold
Which lacks the beauty of all things grown old:
This sombre empty shell that laughs at man,
Its purpose long forgot and void its plan:
This prison of splendid squalor by the waves
Left squatting -- dead the master, fled the slaves,
From out its dark brown windowless deep walls
Where, smoky red, the sun of evening falls
Over cold chimneys that desire to sleep
But yet to heaven totter, sway, or leap.
Along the sterile earth, like lines of pain,
Stand etched the shadows of each rusty crane.
These once swung precious bales high in the air;
But now, like twisted cripples, in despair,
Gaze on the ground, half-strewn with vague debris:
On torn-up rails, rubbish and starveling tree,
Near by which stands a shack, crazy and frail.
Within, cadaverous, shaggy-bearded, pale,
Like a lost dog there sits a lonely man.
'Tis but an outcast, 'neath the dreadful ban
Of hunger, thirst, and all futility;
An evil hermit of dreams he looks to be:
A black monk waiting for this corpse to fall,
That he may spring, and, like a lean jackal,
Tear from its bones whatever fragments fate
Forgot to take when it grew desolate.
Within his eyes averted, stupid, blind,
Something seems ever moving like that wind
Which humming murmurs here, restless and sweet,
Amid the dust once stirred by workmen's feet.





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