HERE you had taken me in summer, in peace. Now winter had come, now war. I went again along this English, ordinary stream, the same — only prim, undevious then, now straggled through squelchy fields; went by the nominal gate more walked around than opened; by the wood, mossed over ankle; by the startling pheasants to the plain, familiar house, the gorse, the common. War now, peace then; but now it was full of you, of you who are dead as the years make lovers dead. The indignant birds, dogs' muted barking, far, the gate's chipped texture — not with my thoughtless hand, my eyes, my ears, I noted these. I knew them only in you, remembering how you walked and saw and heard and made this place alive. I was the ghost in your created world. ... And, in that time, I was in love again; and felt again the anguish, drank the spirit, vigorous, hot and mad that you fomented. And the rest of life was nothing. Life was you. And then was peace. The hand of a dark cloud blindfolded the sun; the sun could not look at me, but still the bright pencils of its glances came through splayed cloud-fingers, fell on the mile-off trees, lightened a brown field with a brush of gold — until the fingers closed. I saw the balloons, the flies of conscience on a warless glass, heard through the vanishing curtain of your voice the humming of invisible aeroplanes. The war came back. The war came harsh as hail — showed me again that stretcher's crimson dust, its still, doll-pallid figure; showed me the street, a trim mouth stricken with a giant decay, the mouth of London, broken; showed me that street, the floor of London, strewn with the piled-up years, the accumulations of unpublic lives, the innocent secrets dirtied underneath strange feet and strange, uninterested eyes; and the baleful torch that night, lit in the docks, reflecting all London's dark anxiety. All this, all this — and I stood like a fool, in the gorse, in the peace of birds, I, fuddled with bombs, and groping for the synthesis between your smile and Piccadilly's blood-red walls. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...INTERRACIAL by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY: GODWIN JAMES by EDGAR LEE MASTERS |