Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TRINITY COLLEGE, TORONTO, by WILSON PUGSLEY MACDONALD


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TRINITY COLLEGE, TORONTO, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: I wrap about me this cold cloak of rain
Last Line: Nor heeds the ghosts that follow in his tread.
Subject(s): Trinity College, Toronto, Canada


I WRAP about me this cold cloak of rain,
Fibred with sullen smoke and woven with wind,
And come from marble and stone, which never sinned,
To these old walls of honored scar and stain,
These bricks with human laughter in their grain,
These scriptured towers of humble girth and reach,
This ivy that would give her dumb walls speech.

Late is the autumn afternoon: dim light
Wakens a cloudy window here and there,
Enhancing but the gloom of hall and stair
Up which an old man comes with waning might --
Lengthened has grown each day for him that flight,
As twilight shadows lengthen when the sun
Feels that his splendid course is nearly run.

Each summer these cold hallways yearn for sound,
And wonder why the silence is so long,
Wonder why youth and comradeship and song
Should die to one old warder on his round.
And then, when peace in quietness they have found,
Comes red October, letting silence out
And bringing back the joy of laugh and shout.

But soon no more will youth come here again:
No more will classic droning drowse the ear
With lyrics of a far, forgotten year;
No longer will brown, campus-loving men
Prove hateful squares and angles with the pen;
No more will midnight frolic hear the roar
Of her own restless foot upon the floor.

High, on a prouder campus, they have wrought,
In this old patriarch's form a noble pile,
Clean of the etching wind and tempest's guile,
Gripping in granite strength the ancient thought,
But bringing not that moveless thing they sought --
That drab, historic bloom which Time commands,
That loveliness which is not made with hands.

Not to the grander structure can they call
The patient script, by sun and rain designed,
Which on the parchment of old walls we find,
Nor that patrician gloom of room and hall,
Nor the proud spirit brooding over all,
Nor dark and musty crannies with their store
Of buried dreams and unremembered lore.

Nor can they bear away with cunning art
The legendary touch and fabled sound
Of that invisible edifice which is bound
With phantom brick and mortar of the heart,
That is not bought nor sold on any mart,
Or those dim wraiths of faded smiles and tears
And hopes and disappointments of dead years.

How can they call one footstep from that stair
That will not give up memories that are sweet,
Or hope upon some mimicked flight to greet
Our deathless scholar, shy yet debonair,
Who teased such quiet lyrics from the air,
Who loved the phrasing of these ancient trees
That washed against his sleep like inland seas!

Around the old, gray buildings creeps the night,
As though she felt a kinship with their gloom;
Afar, the blatant clocks of commerce boom
And all the hueless acres wake with light.
The grim, old watchman crawls his dreaded flight
And worms through darkness to his early bed,
Nor heeds the ghosts that follow in his tread.





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