Mest læste ▸
Marjorie Pickthall
Endlessly fell her chestnut flowers,
Faint snow throughout the honeyed dark ;
The myrtle spread his boughs to drink
Deep draughts of salt from the sea's brink,
And like a moon-dial swung her tower's
Straight shadow o'er her warded park.
From her calm coasts the galleons fled,
The fisher steered him further west,
No port was hailed, no keel came home
Across that pale, enchanted foam,
But by her roof the thrushes fed
And wandering swallows found their rest.
The shadows touched her tenderly,
The red beam lingered on her dress;
The white gull and the osprey knew
Her tower across the leagues of blue.
the tower knows nothing of the hill
travel is a sort of music
counterfeiting hands and discourses
not fit for paper that still word away
like a man gone out
of his quiet mind
lost
all morning in a marsh
the tower with us
I am a tower
of borrowed matter,
ill with all yesterday
like my head
with the wine I drank
today.
Tower of marl, homely
in a chess set.
Fuddled, talking, the others fell.
The tower we made is quiet.
Overcome with drink, I ride in.
The tower stood waiting.
A man respects the discourse
of so many cavaliers.
You can raise the dead,
make yr walls crumble.
(Now! the towers give way,
tumble like the sky
runs before a storm)
You talk long enough,
youll join yr own song.
Sure you can raise the dead--
Dont hesitate,
but watch what youre making.
How it moves without you
Now in the gloom the pulsing drums repeat,
And all the night is filled with evil sound;
I hear the throbbing on inhuman feet
On marble stairs that silence locks around.
I see black temples loom against the night,
With tentacles like serpents writhed afar,
And waving in a dusky dragon light
Great moths whose wings unholy tapers char.
Red memory on memory, tier on tier,
Builds up a tower, time and space to span;
Through world on world I rise, and sphere on sphere,
To star-shot gulfs of lunacy and fear—
Black screaming ages never dreamed by man.
Was this your plan, foul spawn of cosmic mire,
To freeze my soul to stone and icy fire,
To carve me in the moon that all mankind
'Although I'd lie lapped up in linen
A deal I'd sweat and little earn
If I should live as live the neighbours,'
Cried the beggar, Billy Byrne;
'Stretch bones till the daylight come
On great-grandfather's battered tomb.'
Upon a grey old battered tombstone
In Glendalough beside the stream,
Where the O'Byrnes and Byrnes are buried,
He stretched his bones and fell in a dream
Of sun and moon that a good hour
Bellowed and pranced in the round tower;
Of golden king and silver lady,
Bellowing up and bellowing round,
Till toes mastered a sweet measure,
Mouth mastered a sweet sound,
It was just like everything else in life:
Something outside myself drew me down,
My own strength never failed me.
Why, there was the time I earned the money
With which to go away to school,
And my father suddenly needed help
And I had to give him all of it.
Just so it went till I ended up
A man-of-all-work in Spoon River.
Thus when I got the water-tower cleaned,
And they hauled me up the seventy feet,
I unhooked the rope from my waist,
And laughingly flung my giant arms
Over the smooth steel lips of the top of the tower—
But they slipped from the treacherous slime,
And down, down, down, I plunged