Classic Poem

Like a soaking blanket overhead
Spongy and lax the sky was spread,
Opaque as the eye of a fish long dead.

Like trees in a drawing gummed together
Some trees stood dim in the drizzling weather;
Sweating mere blood-flowers gloomed the heather.

Like a festering gash left gaping wide
That foul canal, long swooned from tide,
The marshy moorland did divide.

In a slushy hollow near its bank,
Where noisome weeds grew thick and dank,
And the very soil like an old corpse stank,

They cowered together, the man and crone,
Two old bags of carious bone;
They and a mangy cur alone:

Ragged, haggard, filthy, both;
Viewing each the other loath;
Growling now and then an oath.

She at length with a spasm raised
Her strong grey eyes, still strong tho' glazed;
And thus her meditations phrased:

" No mite left of all our treasure;
Sin itself has no more pleasure:
Drained out, drained out, our full measure!"

He quavered back: " It does seem so:
The sun 'e died out long ago;
The earth and the sky are a-rottin' slow?"

She writhed her thick brows, dirty grey:
" Then take at once my easy way
Of swamping misery from our clay.

" No trembling, dear red-rat-eyes! Come!
We slip together through that green scum,
And then with the world here rot on dumb."

He sat still, nipping spiteful blows
On the snarling cur's amorphous nose;
Relishing faintly her propose.

" Well you look lovely, so you do,
To call me names: a-drowndin' you
Would go to spoil this pleasant view!

" This 'ere damned life is bad enough;
But, say we smother in that stuff,
Our next life's only worse, you muff!"

The woman thereto coldly sneered:
" Of course, as usual all afeared,
Old slaver-dewy stubble-beard.

" Idiot and coward! hell-flames feed
On certain fuel; but, indeed,
A used-up soul won't sate their greed.

" When Earth once gets us cold and stark
She'll keep us safely in the dark:
No fear of rousing with the lark!

" Full long ago in grim despair,
She growled, How those two witch-fires flare!
They'll get no second chance I swear!"

She laught this truth out 'gainst the man;
Who shuffling, ill at ease, began:
" You can be devilish sore, you can.

" Suppose you're right; this life's a one
That's cursed bad, but better than none....
I wish they'd light another Sun.

" We used to spree and we don't spree now;
A screw is loose in the world, allow,
We didn't make it, anyhow.

" Say Life's hard-up, No-life's more glum:
Just think — a lashing lot of rum,
And a night with you and a cool old chum!"

She fingered a toad from its love-work sweet,
And flung to the cur with a " Mangy, eat;
They say there's poison in the meat;

" And so the next time you bite this dear
He'll die off mad; for else I fear
He'd fester for ever and ever here."

Its loose fangs squashed through the nectarous lump;
Then it went and crouched on a doddered stump,
With an evil eye on the Male Sin's hump.

He blinked and shuffled and swore and groaned:
Rasping the bristly beard she owned,
She thought drear thoughts until she too moaned.

" I see the truth," with a scornful laugh,
" I have starved abroad on the swine-fouled draff,
While sleek at home sucked the fatt'ning calf.

" Too late, too late! Yet it's good to see,
If only damnation, thoroughly;
My Life has never met with me.

" And you , you never loved me, you!
A heart that never once beat true,
How could it love? I loved for two.

" This dirty crumpled rag of a breast
Was globed with milk once; I possest
The means of being grandly blest!

" Did the babe of mine suck luscious sips,
Soothing the nipple with rose-soft lips
While her eyes drooped mild in a dear eclipse?

" A babe! — could I now squeeze out three drops
Between that poor cur's ulcerous chaps,
He'd die as livid as you tree-tops.

" You know where it rests, that child-dream gone?
Come, grope in this charming water-lawn,
Through ooze and slime and filth and spawn:

" Perhaps we shall find a shudderous feel,
Neither of eft, nor toad, nor eel;
May hear a long long stifled squeal:

" Touch the rotten bones of a murdered brat
Whose flesh was daynt to the water-rat, —
If it does gnaw flesh, it would relish that!"

He ventured, " Curse all memory!
It's more than thirty years:" but she
Continued fierce, unheedingly.

" Come, and this loathsome life out-smother,
No fear that we'll ever have another:
The rain may beat and the wind may wuther,

" But we shall rot with the rotting soil,
Safe in sleep from the whole sad coil;
Sleep's better than corn and wine and oil.

" Here's a kiss; now at once!" effused the witch,
And dragged the wildered male to the ditch,
And plunged there prone by a bladdery bitch.

Drowned dead, stone dead ... and still her grasp
Clawed him : but with a frenzied gasp
He shuddered off the scranny clasp.

Up the soddened bank in a fury of funk
He sprawled: " She's awful! but she's sunk;
I daren't die except dead drunk."

He managed at length the hollow to win;
And was gulping down with a pang-writhed grin
The black bottle's last of vitriol gin,

When his gorge was choked by a sudden blight:
The cur growled mad with venom and fright,
And its blotches of hair all bristled upright.

Its frenzy burst out in a wolfish yell;
It leapt at his throat like an imp of hell;
In a spasm of horror the bottle fell:

It griped up his flaccid throat with a force
That made his terrorment gurgle hoarse,
While he turned as blue as a cholera-corse.

It haled him into the festering dike;
So all sank dead in its clam alike, —
The Man, the Woman, the virtuous Tyke.

And the dense rain crooned in its sullen flow
From the sodden sky-stretch drooping low
To the sodden earth; and to and fro

Crept a maundering wind too weak to blow;
And the dim world murmured dismal woe:
For the earth and the sky were a-rotting slow.