Classic Poem

At the hour when to-day's effort changes
Into to-morrow's tedious stranger,
We parry the prospective boredom
With elbows deaf upon the cafe-table.
And to our uncompleted course we say
(In so many drinks and lapses of conscience)
Haughtily, as to a novice in time,
" This is an evening."

Then to the less strategic idleness
Of sleep and its compelled remissions —
What, dreaming, do we not forswear
Of yesterday's consecutive intent?
Even Slug Memory becomes an outsider
When, loath to attain, we stanch
The laborious infatuation
Of the past with the future.

And we wake to breakfast, not to the day
Which stalks our reluctant bedside
In vicarious zeal of continuity.
We wake to the habit of coffee
Descended to us in infinite leisure
From the first morning after the first evening
On which we learnt to divide ourselves
Laggardly from all tyrant liege-selves away.

To a casual nicety we shall now perform
Certain acts of neighbourly compunction
Which regard for our fellow-dawdlers dictates —
It were ungallant not to seem to stir
In such invisible progress-making.
Then, by eternity's grace, we shall sit down
To fill our cups with the eternal yawn
Whose to-night's taste is to-morrow enough.