Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE AFTERMATH, by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN


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THE AFTERMATH, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Swift away the century flies
Last Line: Where the kind dove would never brood.
Alternate Author Name(s): Blunden, Edmund
Subject(s): Time


SWIFT away the century flies,
Time has yet the wind for wings,
In the past the midnight lies;
But my morning never springs.

Who goes there? come, ghost or man,
You were with us, you will know;
Let us commune, there's no ban
On speech for us if we speak low.

Time has healed the wound, they say,
Gone's the weeping and the rain;
Yet you and I suspect, the day
Will never be the same again.

Is it day? I thought there crept
Some frightened pale rays through the fog,
And where the lank black ash-trees wept
I thought the birds were just agog.

But no, this fiction died before
The swirling gloom, as soon as seen;
The thunder's brow, the thunder's roar,
Darkness that's felt strode swift between.

O euphrasy for ruined eyes!
I chose, it seemed, a flowering thorn;
The white blooms were but brazen lies,
The tree I looked upon was torn

In snarling lunacy of pain,
A brown charred trunk that deadly cowered,
And when I stared across the plain
Where once the gladdening green hill towered,

It shone a second, then the greed
Of death had fouled it; dark it stood,
A hump of wilderness untreed
Where the kind Dove would never brood.





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