Читать книгу October and Other Poems with Occasional Verses on the War - Bridges Robert - Страница 9

Thro’ innocent eyes at the world awond’ring

Nothing spake to me more superbly

Than the round bastion of Windsor’s wall

That warding the Castle’s southern angle

An old inheritor of Norman prowess

Was call’d by the folk the Curfew Tow’r.

Above the masonry’s rugged courses

A turreted clock of Caroline fashion

Told time to the town in black and gold.

It charmed the hearts of Henry’s scholars

As kingly a mentor of English story

As Homer’s poem is of Ilion:

Nor e’er in the landscape look’d it fairer

Than when we saw its white bulk halo’d

In a lattice of slender scaffoldings.

Month by month on the airy platforms

Workmen labour’d hacking and hoisting

Till again the tower was stript to the sun:

The old tow’r? Nay a new tow’r stood there

From footing to battlemented skyline

And topt with a cap the slice of a cone

Archæologic and counterfeited

The smoothest thing in all the high-street

As Eton scholars to-day may see:

They—wherever else they find their wonder

And feed their boyhood on Time’s enchantment—

See never the Tow’r that spoke to me.