Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, LUDGATE HILL-DECEMBER NIGHT, by JAMES MONAHAN


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

LUDGATE HILL-DECEMBER NIGHT, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Here was the heart
Last Line: Over the craters, a banner from the dome.
Subject(s): Memory; Mountains; Travel; Hills; Downs (great Britain); Journeys; Trips


HERE was the heart,
and these the veins that carried history
from the Mermaid Tavern to the Antipodes,
worn, ancient ways to ships and conquered oceans.
Proud ways — and obscure tributaries, binding
between a suburb and a salary,
their reason durable as the cashier's desk,
the stool, the ledger, the nineteenth-century stone
at this purse-anchored end. This drudgery
laid human avenues, with signposts there.

But the stool has gone, and the stone. And with them crumbled
stiff generations, the formulae for lives,
the gold-chained guildsman's comfortable mould,
to relics of dust, blood, scaffolding: stark hedges
by pavements where the moon still smoothly lies,
by roads where alone are old lineaments unbroken,
tough threading through an intricate design,
the clearer since it is shattered. You may see,
oh, never so clear as in the pale night's lantern,
each criss-cross, curve, each cul-de-sac, each square,
a blueprint, magical, across the waste.
(But you may see
the knife, the inanimate, stretched body, naked,
each sinew plotted, each trivial ligament
a note on Anatomy. Here pupils read
the delicately gathered grooves where mind
ran into movement. But those rivers ran
through perishable soil; the man is dead,
and all that skill is tangled vacancy.)

So bend the roads among this desolation
in lines and cyphers of a lunatic scrawl,
so flaunt their signs "no entry"; and who would enter,
save the coroner of chaos, such as I —
these graveyard, echoing roads, roads derelict
of their old, firm purposes, old roads that died?

Old roads that died. Yet (where that skeleton steel
has, prayerless, raised its tortured arms to pray,
and where, behind a centuries' pediment,
stars hide), there all the supplicant moon's fingers
are shining to one towering comforter;
like living rays, the streets flow out of it —
and, see, the devastation is transformed,
is levelled in silver adoration. Fear
empties from the city. Transient war
had never strength like this serenity.
Salt eyes along the river through their mists
see the high shadow. Far the shadow falls
across grimed funnels, creaking masts and storms
and inarticulate men, with minds at home
and bodies dying in unpacific seas
for peace upon their island.
Here is the heart,
measured to a swelling and an older pulse
than ever the rhythm in these ephemeral walls.
The enduring heart of history is here,
where stands the cathedral's consolation still,
a mass of pity, and where young moonlight flies
over the craters, a banner from the dome.





Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!


Other Poems of Interest...
Home: PoetryExplorer.net