Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, COAL, by JOHN GOULD FLETCHER


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

COAL, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: A valley, narrow as the pit
Last Line: Coal.
Subject(s): Coal Mines & Miners; Labor & Laborers; London; Work; Workers


A VALLEY, narrow as the pit,
Without a blossoming thing in it:
Raw and dirty, an unwashed wound.
In the midst, insurgently rise
Wheels' sharp-fretted traceries,
Chimneys that score with smoke the skies.
It is a cancer-spot, a fane,
A mass of hovels, a city of men,
A mart of mud and blood and gold,
A thing that clings to earth's bosom cold
And sucks the last drops from her breasts running dry,
Gorging the coal as it comes from the mine.
Grind of wheels and dank of pumps
Make the thick air twitch and shrink
Like broken nerves, throughout the day.
As dawn throws his torch in the soot-hung sky
An aimless procession shuffles by:
The men march out for another day
Of darkness in the pits below.
When the dusk swoops swiftly down,
Like a black vulture, on the town,
They shamble back, the self-same way,
Towards the mocking bedazzling glow
Of bar-rooms, seeking with hungry eyes
Over the streets for their votaries.
But they have borne their prize away:
Black, but with life-blood dripping red,
It fills their wastes with sense and soul;
It makes all love and hate and strife,
Fairer than song, better than bread,
The harvest-hope, the life of life,
Coal!
Downwards suddenly plunge the cages
From the daylight, to the vast
Abysmal silence of the night:
Now the thick earth holds them fast:
The slaves who sell life for death's wages,
Risking indifferently the blast
Of gas exploding, that choking death.
They tumble into iron carts
Their grimy bodies, as they start,
An echo follows them behind
Through the mean tunnels which drearily wind
Onward and on.
Clanking, clattering, bumping, grinding,
The carts roll through them, onward and on.
At last, they make a sudden stay.
Lo now, beneath a spluttering ray,
The half-stripped bodies at their toil!
Backs that gleam as wet with oil;
Picks alternately aswing,
Crashing with dull and sullen ring;
Hewing the thick tough carbon out.
These men strive stoutly there, no doubt,
At the sacred shrine of their joy and despair!
One of them, weary and loath,
Yawns, and mutters an obscene oath:
Another spits; and one agape
Grins, expectant of some jape.
But the steel picks rise and fall, --
Relentless pendulums, -- through it all.
Blood of it and bone of it,
Above on earth, are men in towns;
Statesmen, churchmen, rogues and downs,
Doing all things fit, unfit:
Palaces and hairpins making,
Pamphleteering, loafing, baking.
Black, but with life -- blood dripping red,
It fills their breasts with sense and soul:
It makes all love and hate and strife,
Fairer than song, better than bread,
The harvest-hope, the life of life --
Coal.





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