Classic Poem

This place is quick with fire as was the mount
Cithaeron once with madness, though the fount
Into no blinding lake
Nor Phlegethontine sluice of flame outbreak,
But parcelled in a brick-knit honeycomb
The Demiurge become the myriad gnome,
And, like a river tapped for millwheel leets
And conduit-pipes, retail his sovereign heats.

Pale curdled clouds above the monstrous town
Remotely neighbouring, neither smile nor frown,
And shires of stithies bristle up to them,
Whose every burly sky-provoking stem
Blossoms the white, the dusk, the swarthy bloom
Of orbèd vapour, flying a Captain's plume
Upon Vulcanic chivalries at work.

Half blaze, half-murk,
The battlefield of the hammer and the forge
Pavilioned of the mettle they disgorge
From thousand rough embrasèd throats of force,
Darkles and roars; the daylight runs his course
Dishonoured, and the natural night descends
Unheeded, and the labour never ends,
But still relaying squad for weary squad
They serve the altars of the tireless god.

All through the quiet evening shines a dance,
Timed to the beat of uncomposèd chance,
Of supple flames uptossing in the void,
Lithe as a ball on fountain jet upbuoyed,
Lickerish modes, a caper and a squat,
Still catching after prey where prey is not
Except the sodden irresponsive air
That chills the flashes to a surly glare.
Knowing no sleep
The whole night long they leap and lurch and leap,
And sear the edges of the night where dim
She mats about the sooty chimney-brim:
Unseen of any—save such watch as keeps
The drowsy midnight traveller, who peeps
Through purblind panes, and feels the train devour
Her half-a-hundred roaring miles an hour,
And counts the constellated railway lights
Low-hung in jewelled reds and greens and whites,
And counts the Fells and moonlit Midland swards
That fade beside him bolting Londonwards.

O sadly fallen God of Fire,
A slave thyself by human slaveries groomed,
Drudging for just a fuel-ration's hire
In crypts of clay and gaols of ore inhumed!

Could he release awhile his early rage,
Kick free from this mechanic equipage
The giant anger minced in menial blast,
Son of the Sun disowned, inearthed, outcast
From highest inheritance,
Shamefaced to skulk and blink his father's glance!
Think you he would not with a sudden magic
Turn the long sport they make of him to tragic?
Think you not every prison wall would pass
Into a red, translucent veil of glass?
Oh! he'd but draw a deeper breath—a whiff,
And lo! the tides would melt the rooted cliff!
Swung in the clasp of that absorbing gust
His captors' world would blind the skies with dust,
With winds of waste the inland airs defile
And stifle every trembling leeward isle!