Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 2. SUNDAY MORNING AFTER CHURCH, by EDWARD CARPENTER


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 2. SUNDAY MORNING AFTER CHURCH, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Sunday morning just after church -- and a light warm
Last Line: Teeth.
Subject(s): Churches; Humanity; Sabbath; Cathedrals; Sunday


SUNDAY morning just after church—and a light warm wind from the North
flutters laden with the scent of hay out to sea;
The sea lies crisp and calm, slate-green, stretching itself miles and miles
to the wind—wonderful, ecstatic, pushing back with liquid-velvet paws upon
the shore.

On the sea-side esplanade there is a good-sized crowd—perhaps a
thousand grown men and women walking up and down on one exclusive and
fashionable stretch of grass.
It is quite a sight. Scarlet parasols and blue and white lined with pink,
tall hats shining speckless, kid-gloves reaching to the elbow—with glitter
of gold and silver bangles, and soft sheen and rustle of dresses. All subdued
and polite, colors carefully chosen, voices low, movements measured.

Let us take a seat here. How pleasant the air is! and the shade of the
great clouds! and the dazzling effect of so many going to and fro!
Here comes one—her face not very easy to be seen for her
parasol—but her chin is softly rounded, and the tinge and tissue of her
skin most delicate. She wears a very light salmon-pink silk slashed with blue.
She is with her mother and an elder sister, and seems to be doing her best,
gentle child, to be the correct thing.
Here another of bolder sort—dark handsome eyes, just flashing often
enough to keep him amused on the man who is walking beside her; lips a trifle
too red, but contrasting well with the great yellow rose on her shoulder and the
violet velveteen tunic; figure admirable, but her face somewhat wan beneath its
petulance and inquisitiveness.
There goes an old beau, carefully brushed grizzled hair, faultless
boots—knows everybody, a good-natured and amusing crony; here a grey-haired
baronet and his wife, both demure and short-sighted (no question but they have
been to church); there again, a few steps to the left, three young men arm in
arm, carefully got up, exchanging whispered comments.

Hist! this elderly matron and her daughter are coming to sit beside us!
Heavy and heated, in rich silks deeply flounced and embroidered, and tight
spindle-heeled boots—they seem glad of a rest.
The dress of the elder one especially is a study—the flounces, the
innumerable quantity of beads, the formless mass of plaits and gathers, the
wonderful arrangement of whalebones in the body, the strict lacing down the
back, the frills and lace round neck and shoulders, the several rings seen on
the for a moment ungloved hand, the lump of trinkets suspended from her waist,
and the usual headgear [—one cannot help thinking of the chaotic mass of
human work this idle red easy-tempered woman carries about on her body].

I close my eyes for a moment. How pleasant still and soft the air is!
A vision goes past of dark and unspoken things—of criminals in prison,
of rags and disease and destitution.
Naked and outcast forms hurry by;
The mother snatches some half-pence from her boy match-seller, and makes
for the nearest gin-shop; squalid streets and courts are in the background, and
filthy workshops;
Forms of humanity pass before me, unclothed; voices hover round, wordless;
Strange clinging voices call; through the long high arches floating,
through the night strange voices call.

O freedom! O shadow and night! and forms half-shapen in the womb of
night—to the outlet of deliverance!

These naked and outcast—I contemplate them long, undisguised; what
they are is not hidden from me, I go back of them and bevond.

I pass as one among them, and feel the touch of their bodies, and of their
arms twining—and turn down tired and sleep beside those who sleep;
Half-human, crazy, hungry, condemned, bitter-lipped, forsaken,
The young man with divine face so pale and misshapen I see—I see the
poor thin body of the dying mother.
[She is ignorant and unlettered, but when she talks to me in perfect
child-like trust of the future of her orphaned children I think I have heard the
words of the profoundest Wisdom that ever were uttered.]

The rags fall off, the prison doors fly wide.
In vast phalanx, as out of night and oblivion,
Unclothed, majestic, with wounds and disfigurements, as of him who hung
upon the Cross—
With stretched arms, shadow-gigantic and shining, as just alighted on the
earth—they stand. I hear their voices call—
Strange wild and inarticulate—
Through the long high arches floating, through the night their voices call.


I open my eyes again. The gay crowd still glides past, exchanging
greetings, the flounces and lace are still on the chair beside me. I catch the
fluffy smell.
I rise and pass down towards the sea. It lies there, unnoticed as before,
slate-green and solemn, stretching miles and miles away; but the wind has risen
and is rising, and in the distance here and there it is fretful with sharp white
teeth.





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