Cities of cinemas and lighted bars,
Smokers of tall bituminous cigars,
Whose evenings are a smile of golden teeth—
Upon your cenotaphs I lay this wreath
And so commend you to the moon and stars.
For I attain your presence in the dark
Deriding gossip Reuter’s twittered spark
And reach you rails that, swifter in career,
Arrive as due as they depart from here—
I am a tour on which the hours embark.
Through me the moon, in ruled meridian steel,
Unwinding journeys from a burnished reel,
Stitches the world with threads of fire: each clue,
Pulleyed with rolling-stock as webs with dew,
A nerve for sleeping capitals to feel.
Their life-blood circulating in my veins,
With runnelled iron I irrigate the plains
And spider touring metal through the rock,
While to the same tentacular tick-tock
My scarecrow signals semaphore their trains.
Under this bleak mechanical display
I screen an inward knowledge, when the day
X-rays the fingers of my open hand
Over the chess-board acres of the land
Whose towns are shifted peons in the play.
Progress, the blue macadam of their dream,
Its railed and shining hippodrome of steam,
Glazed by cool horsepower, varnished clean with wheels,
Filming their destiny in endless reels,
Defers the formal ending that they scheme.
They greet each other in these gliding cars,
Read the same nightly journal of the stars,
And when the rail rings I can hear the bells
Ringing for dinner in the world’s hotels
And after that that the closing of the bars.
Though they have taught the lightning how to lie
And made their wisdom to misread the sky
I hold their pulses: through my ringing loom
Their trains with flying shuttles weave a doom
I am too sure a prophet to defy.
And when they jargon through the wind and rain
Breathing false hopes upon a frosty pane,
I hear the sad electrocuted words
Thud from the wires like stiffly-frozen birds
That warming hands resuscitate in vain.
The de Profundis of each canine hell
Voices their needs in its voluptuous swell:
While from the slums the radio’s hollow strain
From hungry guts ventriloquizing pain
Belies them, as it sobs that all is well.
Then like a flawless magnet to the fact
Into my secret knowledge I attract
Their needles of dissimulated fear
Whose trembling fingers indicate me here
The focus of their every mood and act.
What hopes are theirs, what knowledge they forgo
From day to day procrastinating woe—
I, balancing each project and desire,
Funambulize upon my strands of fire
Too many aspirations not to know.
I am plexus of their myriad schemes,
And were I flesh the ruin would undo me
Of all the purposes they sinew through me,
Of thwarted embassies, and beaten teams,
And home-returning honeymoons as gloomy.
How shrill the long hosannas of despair
With which those to-fro scolopendras bear,
Statesmen to conferences, troops to war—
All that concerted effort can restore
Like rattled cans to porters of despair!
But in the waiting-room where Time has beckoned
His vanguard, every moment must be reckoned
And fierce anticipation push the clock
Though for each same reiterated second
The whole world swing its pendulum of rock.
Far on the plain my waving pennons stream,
In the blue light the white horsetailing steam:
Or where they storm the night with rosy cirrus—
(Armoured incendiary, plumy Pyrrhus!)
Through palaces of ice where eagles scream.
From fog-red docks, the sink of rotting drains,
Where, tipsy giants, reel the workless cranes:
Where in dead liners, that the rust attacks,
Sprung decks think back beyond the saw and axe,
And masts put on the green of country lanes—
I tentacle the news: relay the mails:
And sense the restive anger that prevails
Wherever shafts descend or girders rise:
And day and night their steel-to-steel replies
Hum in my bolts and tingle in my rails.
These tons of metal rusting in the rain
(Iron on strike) are singing one refrain:
Let steel hang idle, burning rust devour,
Till Beauty smile upon the face of Power
And Love unsheathe me from the rust again …
My rails that rove me through the whispered corn
Bring me the tidings of a world unborn:
My sleepers escalading to the skies
Beyond the far horizons seem to rise
And form a Jacob’s ladder to the morn.
And I often thought by lonely sidings—
What shepherd or what cowboy in his ridings
Forges the Sword so terrible and bright
That brings not peace, but fury of delight,
And of whose coming I have had the tidings.
They are the tidings of a world’s relief:
My aching rails run out for their belief
To where a halted Star or rising Crescent
Above a byre or sheepfold hangs quiescent,
And meditation reaps the golden sheaf—
The joy that veld and kopje thrice restored
To that bleak wilderness the city horde—
When once the living radios of God,
By ravens fed, the lonely places trod,
And talked with foxes, and with lions roared.
A sword is singing and a scythe is reaping
In those great pylons prostrate in the dust,
Death has a sword of valour in his keeping
To arm our souls towards the future leaping:
And holy holy holy is the rust
Wherein the blue Excaliburs are sleeping!