Collected Poems: Volume Two. Alfred Noyes
westward window,
Heavy and bloated, rolled
The face of a drunken woman
Nodding against the gold;
Dark before the infinite glory,
With bleared and leering eyes,
It stupidly lurched and nodded
Against the tender skies.
What had ye done to her, masters of men, That her head be bowed down thus— Thus for your golden vespers, And deepening angelus?
Dark, besotted, malignant, vacant,
Slobbering, wrinkled, old,
Weary and wickedly smiling,
She nodded against the gold.
Pitiful, loathsome, maudlin, lonely,
Her moist, inhuman eyes
Blinked at the flies on the window,
And could not see the skies.
As a beast that turns and returns to a mirror
And will not see its face,
Her eyes rejected the sunset,
Her soul lay dead in its place,
Dead in the furrows and folds of her flesh
As a corpse lies lapped in the shroud;
Silently floated beside her
The isles of sunset-cloud.
What had ye done to her, years upon years, That her head should be bowed down thus— Thus for your golden vespers, And deepening angelus?
Her nails were blackened and split with labour,
Her back was heavily bowed;
Silently floated beside her
The isles of sunset-cloud.
Over their tapering streaks of lilac,
In breathless depths afar,
Bright as the tear of an angel
Glittered a lonely star.
While the hills and the streams of the world went past us,
And the long train roared and rolled
Southward, and dusk was falling,
She nodded against the gold.
AN EAST-END COFFEE-STALL
Down the dark alley a ring of orange light
Glows. God, what leprous tatters of distress,
Droppings of misery, rags of Thy loneliness
Quiver and heave like vermin, out of the night!
Like crippled rats, creeping out of the gloom,
O Life, for one of thy terrible moments there,
Lit by the little flickering yellow flare,
Faces that mock at life and death and doom,
Faces that long, long since have known the worst,
Faces of women that have seen the child
Waste in their arms, and strangely, terribly, smiled
When the dark nipple of death has eased its thirst;
Faces of men that once, though long ago,
Saw the faint light of hope, though far away—
Hope that, at end of some tremendous day,
They yet might reach some life where tears could flow;
Faces of our humanity, ravaged, white,
Wrenched with old love, old hate, older despair,
Steal out of vile filth-dropping dens to stare
On that wild monstrance of a naphtha light.
They crowd before the stall's bright altar rail,
Grotesque, and sacred, for that light's brief span,
And all the shuddering darkness cries, "All hail,
Daughters and Sons of Man!"
See, see, once more, though all their souls be dead,
They hold it up, triumphantly hold it up,
They feel, they warm their hands upon the Cup;
Their crapulous hands, their claw-like hands break Bread!
See, with lean faces rapturously a-glow
For a brief while they dream and munch and drink;
Then, one by one, once more, silently slink
Back, back into the gulfing mist. They go,
One by one, out of the ring of light!
They creep, like crippled rats, into the gloom,
Into the fogs of life and death and doom,
Into the night, the immeasurable night.
RED OF THE DAWN
I
The Dawn peered in with blood-shot eyes
Pressed close against the cracked old pane.
The garret slept: the slow sad rain
Had ceased: grey fogs obscured the skies;
But Dawn peered in with haggard eyes.
II
All as last night? The three-legged chair,
The bare walls and the tattered bed,
All!—but for those wild flakes of red
(And Dawn, perhaps, had splashed them there!)
Round the bare walls, the bed, the chair.
III
'Twas here, last night, when winds were loud,
A ragged singing-girl, she came
Out of the tavern's glare and shame,
With some few pence—for she was proud—
Came home to sleep, when winds were loud.
IV
And she sleeps well; for she was tired!
That huddled shape beneath the sheet
With knees up-drawn, no wind or sleet
Can wake her now! Sleep she desired;
And she sleeps well, for she was tired.
V
And there was one that followed her
With some unhappy curse called "love":
Last night, though winds beat loud above,
She shrank! Hark, on the creaking stair,
What stealthy footstep followed her?
VI
But now the Curse, it seemed, had gone!
The small tin-box, wherein she hid
Old childish treasures, had burst its lid.
Dawn kissed her doll's cracked face. It shone
Red-smeared, but laughing—the Curse is gone.
VII
So she sleeps well: