Sunshine through a Cobwebbed Window
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hat charm is yours, you faded old-world tapestries,Of outworn, childish mysteries,Vague pageants woven on a web of dream!And we, pushing and fighting in the turbid streamOf modern life, find solace in your tarnished broideries. Old lichened halls, sun-shaded by huge cedar-trees,The layered branches horizontal stretched, like JapaneseDark-banded prints. Carven cathedrals, on a skyOf faintest colour, where the gothic spires flyAnd sway like masts, against a shifting breeze. Worm-eaten pages, clasped in old brown vellum, shrunkFrom over-handling, by some anxious monk.Or Virgin's Hours, bright with gold and gravenWith flowers, and rare birds, and all the Saints of Heaven,And Noah's ark stuck on Ararat, when all the world had sunk. They soothe us like a song, heard in a garden, sungBy youthful minstrels, on the moonlight flungIn cadences and falls, to ease a queen,Widowed and childless, cowering in a screenOf myrtles, whose life hangs with all its threads unstrung. A London Thoroughfare. 2 A.M. They have watered the street,It shines in the glare of lamps,Cold, white lamps,And liesLike a slow-moving river,Barred with silver and black.Cabs go down it,One,And then another.Between them I hear the shuffling of feet.Tramps doze on the window-ledges,Night-walkers pass along the sidewalks.The city is squalid and sinister,With the silver-barred street in the midst,Slow-moving,A river leading nowhere. Opposite my window,The moon cuts,Clear and round,Through the plum-coloured night.She cannot light the city;It is too bright.It has white lamps,And glitters coldly. I stand in the window and watch the moon.She is thin and lustreless,But I love her.I know the moon,And this is an alien city.
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