Classic and Contemporary Poetry
LUDGATE HILL-DECEMBER NIGHT, by JAMES MONAHAN Poet's Biography First Line: Here was the heart Last Line: Over the craters, a banner from the dome. Subject(s): Memory; Mountains; Travel; Hills; Downs (great Britain); Journeys; Trips | ||||||||
HERE was the heart, and these the veins that carried history from the Mermaid Tavern to the Antipodes, worn, ancient ways to ships and conquered oceans. Proud ways and obscure tributaries, binding between a suburb and a salary, their reason durable as the cashier's desk, the stool, the ledger, the nineteenth-century stone at this purse-anchored end. This drudgery laid human avenues, with signposts there. But the stool has gone, and the stone. And with them crumbled stiff generations, the formulae for lives, the gold-chained guildsman's comfortable mould, to relics of dust, blood, scaffolding: stark hedges by pavements where the moon still smoothly lies, by roads where alone are old lineaments unbroken, tough threading through an intricate design, the clearer since it is shattered. You may see, oh, never so clear as in the pale night's lantern, each criss-cross, curve, each cul-de-sac, each square, a blueprint, magical, across the waste. (But you may see the knife, the inanimate, stretched body, naked, each sinew plotted, each trivial ligament a note on Anatomy. Here pupils read the delicately gathered grooves where mind ran into movement. But those rivers ran through perishable soil; the man is dead, and all that skill is tangled vacancy.) So bend the roads among this desolation in lines and cyphers of a lunatic scrawl, so flaunt their signs "no entry"; and who would enter, save the coroner of chaos, such as I these graveyard, echoing roads, roads derelict of their old, firm purposes, old roads that died? Old roads that died. Yet (where that skeleton steel has, prayerless, raised its tortured arms to pray, and where, behind a centuries' pediment, stars hide), there all the supplicant moon's fingers are shining to one towering comforter; like living rays, the streets flow out of it and, see, the devastation is transformed, is levelled in silver adoration. Fear empties from the city. Transient war had never strength like this serenity. Salt eyes along the river through their mists see the high shadow. Far the shadow falls across grimed funnels, creaking masts and storms and inarticulate men, with minds at home and bodies dying in unpacific seas for peace upon their island. Here is the heart, measured to a swelling and an older pulse than ever the rhythm in these ephemeral walls. The enduring heart of history is here, where stands the cathedral's consolation still, a mass of pity, and where young moonlight flies over the craters, a banner from the dome. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...RICHARD, WHAT'S THAT NOISE? by RICHARD HOWARD LOOKING FOR THE GULF MOTEL by RICHARD BLANCO RIVERS INTO SEAS by LYNDA HULL DESTINATIONS by JOSEPHINE JACOBSEN THE ONE WHO WAS DIFFERENT by RANDALL JARRELL THE CONFESSION OF ST. JIM-RALPH by DENIS JOHNSON SESTINA: TRAVEL NOTES by WELDON KEES TO H. B. (WITH A BOOK OF VERSE) by MAURICE BARING ALBERTINE ASKS FOR A POEM by JAMES MONAHAN |
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