Classic Poem

Dusk lowers in this uneasy pause of rain;
a blackness clings and thickens on the pane
and damp grows; westward only, watery pale,
two yellow streaks, wan glory, slowly fail:
night shall be loud and thick with driving spears. —
And this was also in the haunting years
this life was also in the haunting years
when the lone window watch'd the lonely road
winding into the exiled west, across
the desolate plain, with, seldom on its fosse
tipt black against grey gloom, a poplar spire;
and I could know the sunset's broken fire
burn'd sombrely in many a leaden glass
whose look was dead amid the morbid grass
where never a dancing foot of harvest came
and ways were lost, a land of vanish'd name.