Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, A PARIS NOCTURNE, by WILLIAM SHARP


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

A PARIS NOCTURNE, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Over the lonesome hollows
Last Line: In the scud of the spray.
Alternate Author Name(s): Macleod, Fiona
Subject(s): Paris, France


Over the lonesome hollows
And secret haunts of the river,
Past fields and homestead and village,
Past the grey wharves and the piers
The darkness moves like a veil,
Save when obscure, vast, nigrescent
Flakes from the travelling gloom
Slant westward great fans of blackness.

Then a mist of radiance,
Lamps with red lights and yellow,
Foam-white, and blue as an ice-floe,
Lamps intermingling with gas-light,
Leagues of wind-wavered gas-light,
Lamps on the masts of barges,
Lamps upon sloops and on steamers,
Lamps below quays and dark bridges,
Yellow and red and green,
Like a myriad growths phosphorescent
When a swamp, erewhile flooded with waters,
Lies low to the stare of the moon
And the stealthy white breath of the wind.

And, over all, one light
Palpitant, circular, wide,
Sweeping the city vast --
Yonder, beyond where in shadow
The thronged Champs-Elysees are filling
With echoes of human voices,
With shadows of human lives;
With phantoms of vampyre-vices --
Beyond where the serpentine river
Curves in a coil gigantic,
And straight, a thin shaft, through the vagueness
Soars the high lighthouse of Paris,
Soars o'er the sea of the city
With all its shoals and its terrors,
Its perilous straits and its breakers,
High o'er the brightness and splendour
Of shores where the sirens sing ever.

Then, shadows enmassed once again:
And the river moving slowly,
And the hills making darkness deeper.
The lamps now fewer and fewer --
Fewer the red lights and yellow,
Till only a dusky barge
Moves like a water-snake
On the face of a dark lagoon,
A stealthy fire 'mid the stillness;
While from a weir in the distance
Comes a sound like the cry of waters
When the tides and the sea-winds gather
And the sands of the dunes are scattered
In the scud of the spray.





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