Classic Poem

Night and rain — a silver grating on the night;
Rain, and the wet leaves sobbing beneath my feet;
The small inn waits across the sodden leaves,
Silence at its doors and darkness in the eaves.

The iron lanterns, aureoled with light,
Smear the wet pavements with gold and the wet street
With silver: you would say that fold on fold
Night was being unravelled into gold.

Midnight, deadened like repeated rhyme,
Sounds from the old North . . . I were best in bed.
It's a cold drizzle . . . and the soundless dead
Go groping past and melt into the inn.

Here comes the fops and gallants of old time
In the great morning of the Rights of Man,
Black redingotes and white curled collars to the chin,
The bronze hair tossed in a style republican,

Or in the manner of the Corporal
Who fed men's hearts with fire from Italy,
Stringy and black, smeared with huile antique
To lie like a spaniel's ears along the cheek.

Huge shadows wavered over the rough wall;
Rich firelight swam into the wine to die;
With snaps of silver the glasses shone and touched,
Freedom was thundered, lyric passion smutched.

Here I should have come under a black cape,
A gold silk waistcoat winking in the folds,
And slipping into the quietest of seats
Unpocketed in boards of drab — John Keats.

Then, letting the black edge of my mantle drape
Over one arm — while silver tapped with snuff —
Crumpling my brows as when a grandan scolds,
Read silently each page and sneezed, " What stuff! "

Oh, they were brave lads and they bravely dreamed, —
What matter if they drank and gamed and died?
They dared to dream that man might still be free,
And pledged in bitter claret — Liberty.

And me on whom that heavenly dawn has gleamed
As sunset only — me they hail in pride,
Brother, whenever the rain's slow parallels meet
In shining pallors through the shadowy street.