Classic Poem

Grignolles is a town grown bald
with age; its blue naked crown
of houses is barer than any hill,
on its small hill; — it is a grey town.

It is like a cathedral, crowding and still,
all of a piece, like one sheer house;
like a town built for worship, and called
Grignolles, from the land thereabout.

But it is like a cathedral from which have decayed
all after-thoughts and generous things
added — the warm gradual weft —
all down-coverings from its naked wings.

It seems only first buildings are left,
the virgin soul of first architects;
only the first dream of a town as it leapt
in the brains of the lonely peasants — projects

which the dim granges shaped from their sides,
and a wilderness of gaunt fields that
needed a house as each holding does —
but a great warm house more human than that.

Now something of that first savageness,
and the keen sadness of first plains,
(although the country's grown bourgeois and green)
to the town has come as its soul wanes.

Within, Grignolles is listless and sweet;
its veiled life is not conscious how
its wandering cairn of walls can suggest
in one wild whole things dead now:

just as a man forgets Time's waste,
and his soul's crumbling, and is blind
to a grandeur a little distance gives it —
lives a life veiled, moody and kind.

In the town people live an insect life,
there are three sorts of house in its streets,
and many gardens hid in its walls;
there are two sorts of people one meets.

Its gardens are odorous wells each house
hides with high walls — you never see
these — but you know each bleak great house
has its harem — hid flowers and wind-scented tree.

Of the two sorts of people there met,
one are old — a fierce shy race,
an old life revived as their soul dried;
the others are young, with bold mild face.

Its bare houses are stuccoed and wide.
Grey like the stone-grey of the sky.
Blue like the dull shade of stone when wet:
and white, to tell its small inns by,

as over the porch hangs mistletoe.
Its houses are bleak windy fronts
with stormy windows; or cabins low;
and wandering convents, and sheds chapels once.