Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, MELBOURNE AND MEMORY: PAST AND PRESENT, by FRANK WILMOT


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

MELBOURNE AND MEMORY: PAST AND PRESENT, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Change is a sweet and lovely sprite who brushes with a velvet pall
Last Line: Beauty of decay.
Alternate Author Name(s): Maurice, Furnley
Subject(s): Change; Melbourne, Australia; Time


CHANGE is a sweet and lovely sprite who brushes with a velvet pall
The images of our delight till a soft darkness covers all;
Yet, while we mourn things fair and fond, she smiles, so
secret, so adept,
And wakens with a magic wand new wonders where old wonders slept.

Are visions that the past absorbs more beautiful than the living ones?
The soul is ranged by many restless orbs and faint undying suns,
Burned from memory, burned in flame the pools where furtive
wild things drank;
Gone the adventurers that came and filled their buckets from the bank!

Roll on, proud thoroughfares! Roll on, O Cadillac and
Chevrolet!
Roll over a city that is gone, over a lovelier city way;
The perilous cranes, the crashing walls, mad drills that
wrench our nerves apart,
Barter their trucks of rubble spawls for a changed town and
a changing heart.

City that fosters our desires, that saw our dreams begun,
There is a sun beyond your spires that's like no other sun;
Although your turrets score the sky, alas, for all the
planning brains,
The beautiful, broken hovels lie along the squalid little lanes;
For, though we live by love and truth, we shall not fend all disarray;
The gleaming snarl of Time's white tooth, the terrible
beauty of decay.





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