Walking among the streets of an old city, the speaker feels age and exhaustion everywhere. The streets are lean as salt-cured fish; the walls lean together like tired old midwives doing only what must be done. The city’s great offering to a stranger is row after row of bronze kings. Some are ancient and pious, speaking of God’s love; others are young conquerors who split heads and expanded borders. Yet what strikes the speaker most is the murmur rising from these statues—a restless question: “Is there no loosening? Is this for always?” The bronze kings seem as weary as the streets, trapped in their own legend. One finally cries out to be torn down, melted, and made into neckchains for dancing children. The mood is heavy, strange, and melancholy, but that last wish breaks through with a longing for something lighter and alive.
Streets Too Old — Summary
I WALKED among the streets of an old city and the streets were lean as the throats of hard seafish soaked in salt and kept in barrels many years. How old, how old, how old, we are : — the walls went on saying, street walls leaning toward each other like old women of the people, like old midwives tired and only doing what must be done. The greatest the city could offer me, a stranger, was statues of the kings, on all corners bronzes of kings — ancient bearded kings who wrote books and spoke of God's love for all people — and young kings who took forth armies out across the frontiers splitting the heads of their opponents and enlarging their kingdoms. Strangest of all to me, a stranger in this old city, was the murmur always whistling on the winds twisting out of the armpits and fingertips of the kings in bronze: — Is there no loosening? Is this for always ? In an early snowflurry one cried: — Pull me down where the tired old midwives no longer look at me, throw the bronze of me to a fierce fire and make me into neckchains for dancing children.