Classic Poem

Look through those periwigged green trees
At the tall house . . . impressions seize!

Trees periwigged and snuffy; old
Is silence, with its tales all told,
And Time is shrunken, bare and cold,

And here the malefactor Death
Snuffs out the candle with our breath.
...

The Admiral had soon returned
From active service; " home to die,"
Said he, a patch upon one eye.
The green shade of Death's own yew-tree,
So sightless, seemed that shade to me.

All day in the limp helpless breeze
Beneath the empty platform trees
He sits with Brobdignagian asses,
Talking while the lame time passes —
And each voice seemed the hard trombone
Of harsh seas (blue and white dead bone).
He speaks of friendships long ago
With fairy aristocracies
Who dream in murmurous palaces
Haunted by gold eves — Chinese,
And apes superior to man,
Whose life outlives our mortal span,
And all the strange inhabitants
Of gardens under leaflike seas,
And the Admiral Yang among his plants,
Asking his god what no one grants
When the gold rain begins to fall.

But that green shade of Death's yew-tree,
His patch, will never let him see
The real world, terrible and old,
Where seraphs in the mart are sold
And fires from Bedlam's madness flare
Like blue palm-leaves in desert air;
The prisons where the maimed men pined
Because their mothers bore them blind —
Starved men so thin they seem to be
The shadow of that awful Tree
Cast down on us from Calvary

Beside the sea (blue-white harsh bone
Hard as a ship's deck) while the lone
Great sun with flames like leaves flares slow
In an empty sky like the great Mikado,
The Admiral is lulling these
Unreal owlish people there
Who, though asleep, still sit and stare,
Their dullard faces, planet-round,
Fringed all leafily with sound
Growth of their long heritage:
Beasthood, but grown tame with age.

The Admiral is such a bore,
Sleep murmurs, flows in the heart's core.
Gold as a planet system, rain
Falls in the gardens once again.
The cook as red as an aubergine
Sleeps in her kitchen, fallen between
Two clear-scrubbed wooden kitchen tables
Where creep the growing vegetables. . . .
Crowned are they, and rough and bold. . . .
The ass-hide grass grows over her ears,
And Midas Silence turns to gold
Each little sound she never hears.
The rain is gold as a planet system
Or the silent gardens of the Khan,
And all the world is changed to a green
Growing world to be touched and seen;
And the folk in the caves of far Japan
Hear the triumphant growing sound
And say, " Are the gold-melon flowers we see
The sunrise sound, young pleasure isles,
The soft wind from an incense tree,
Or the gold Mikado's shadowy smiles?"

But the ancient Admiral was loath
To see or hear or dream of growth. . . .
For his existence was not life
But a tired stranger's conversations
(Modulated dull gradations)
With Life, that sleepy old housewife.

And all night long he lies and cowers. . . .
Pink moonlight turns to feathered flowers,
And sleep should be a coral cave
Haunted by a siren wave.

Yet moonlight lies as harsh as brine,
Noah's Flood, or a disused saltmine;
Cold airs prick like grass or the sword
Of Zanies . . . he falls overboard
Into that briny Noah's Flood,
The moonlight, drowning bestial blood.

His house is haunted by the shade
Of Death — no greenness in earth laid . . .
But a monstrous difference agape
Between the nations of the Dead,
A ghost that ne'er took human shape
But has a swinish pig-tailed head
Crowned with trembling ghostly flowers. . . .
It seems a candle guttered down
In a green deserted town.

It can alter at its will —
Batlike to the window-sill
It will cling, with squeaking shrill
Miming Triviality.

Or, shapeless now as a black sea,
Clattering a hellish hoof
With the other dragging after
(Elephantine, muffled o'er) . . .
Oh, that tread breaks down the floor!
And we shall hear its numbing speech —
A roar that will break down the world,
A speech unknown of the race of Man.

The Admiral hears through his door
That shape flow down the corridor. . . .
He trembles when the ghost wind comes. . . .
Outside, among the tallest trees
The gray flowers hang
Like a snipe's plumes, clang
In the wrinkled and the withered breeze.

Come softly and we will look through
The windows from this avenue. . . .
For there my youth passed like a sleep,
Yet in my heart, still murmuring deep,
The small green airs from Eternity,
Murmuring softly, never die.