Classic Poem

O evening, steal into the silent city,
And touch with your chill fingers the drooping buds
Of all the street-lamps, touch and make them bloom,
O Evening, make them burst in flower and sway
Fascinated over their long palpitant reflections in the water;
Make them stand ranked on the dully smouldering pavement,
Make them crouch and glimmer in long bare-branched parks,
Where bowed shapes hurry homewards: make them gleam
Far-off, unreal, in the haze of sunken streets,
Where the dreamers sit immobile in the doorways
Dreaming they have followed the sun: O make them flare
And flame within the city madly, while
You shake about them deeper darkness still,
Till night is perfect: but do not think, O Evening,
To light one torch within my shuttered heart.

I have seen the shadowy shapes of five thousand Evenings
Brusquely or stealthily grapple with the day,
And bear its wasted corpse into the darkness!
I have known that millions of other wasted days have passed,
Like a great stream, into silence; and, I think,
There will be millions on millions of wasted days to come.
O Evening, without stars to hint at dawn,
Or fading glow to tell us of dead days:
Grey winter Evening, that comes when toil is dead,
And sleep is not yet born; brief Evening made
Of dreams and of regrets, scatter your flowers
Over the world and let all else be vain,
But your thin tears and the gesture of dumb despair
Wherewith you strew the city with dim stars,
And slowly bow your dark hair over him.