Читать книгу Poems, 1908-1919 - Drinkwater John - Страница 28

Whence these hods, and bricks of bright red clay,

And swart men climbing ladders in the night?

Stilled are the clamorous energies of day,

The streets are dumb, and, prodigal of light,

The lamps but shine upon a city of sleep.

A step goes out into the silence; far

Across the quiet roofs the hour is tolled

From ghostly towers; the indifferent earth may keep

That ragged flotsam shielded from the cold

In earth’s good time: not, moving among men,

Shall he compel so fortunate a star.

Pavements I know, forsaken now, are strange,

Alien walks not beautiful, that then,

In the familiar day, are part of all

My breathless pilgrimage, not beautiful, but dear;

The monotony of sound has suffered change,

The eddies of wanton sound are spent, and clear

To bleak monotonies of silence fall.

And, while the city sleeps, in the central poise

Of quiet, lamps are flaming in the night,

Blown to long tongues by winds that moan between

The growing walls, and throwing misty light

On swart men bearing bricks of bright red clay

In laden hods; and ever the thin noise

Of trowels deftly fashioning the clean

Long lines that are the shaping of proud thought.

Ghost-like they move between the day and day,

These men whose labour strictly shall be wrought

Into the captive image of a dream.

Their sinews weary not, the plummet falls

To measured use from steadfast hands apace,

And momently the moist and levelled seam

Knits brick to brick and momently the walls

Bestow the wonder of form on formless space.

And whence all these? The hod and plummet-line,

The trowels tapping, and the lamps that shine

In long, dust-heavy beams from wall to wall,

The mortar and the bricks of bright red clay,

Ladder and corded scaffolding, and all

The gear of common traffic – whence are they?

And whence the men who use them?

When he came,

God upon chaos, crying in the name

Of all adventurous vision that the void

Should yield up man, and man, created, rose

Out of the deep, the marvel of all things made,

Then in immortal wonder was destroyed

All worth of trivial knowledge, and the close

Of man’s most urgent meditation stayed

Even as his first thought – “Whence am I sprung?”

What proud ecstatic mystery was pent

In that first act for man’s astonishment,

From age to unconfessing age, among

His manifold travel. And in all I see

Of common daily usage is renewed

This primal and ecstatic mystery

Of chaos bidden into many-hued

Wonders of form, life in the void create,

And monstrous silence made articulate.

Not the first word of God upon the deep

Nor the first pulse of life along the day

More marvellous than these new walls that sweep

Starward, these lines that discipline the clay,

These lamps swung in the wind that send their light

On swart men climbing ladders in the night.

No trowel-tap but sings anew for men

The rapture of quickening water and continent,

No mortared line but witnesses again

Chaos transfigured into lineament.