Works

"Get ye up from the wrath of God's terrible day!
Ungirded, unsandalled, arise and away!
'T is the vintage of blood, 't is the fulness of time,
And vengeance shall gather the harvest of crime!"
...

Canst thou not rest, O city,
That liest so wide and fair;
Shall never an hour bring pity,
Nor end be found for care?

Thy walls are high in heaven,
Thy streets are gay and wide,...

The Sun hung like a red balloon
As if he would not rise;
For listless Helios drowsed and yawned.
He cared not whether the morning dawned,
The brother of Eos and the Moon...

A white bird is the big sky.
Under it a cowering city stares.
The houses are half-dead old people.
A gaunt carriage-horse gapes grumpily.
Winds, skinny dogs, run weakly....

Beyond the dusky corn-fields, toward the west,
Dotted with farms, beyond the shallow stream,
Through drifts of elm with quiet peep and gleam,
Curved white and slender as a lady's wrist,...

I

To none the city bends a servile knee;
Purse-proud and scornful, on her heights she stands,
And at her feet the great white moaning sea
Shoulders incessantly the grey-gold sands, -...

The panting City cried to the Sea,
"I am faint with heat,--O breathe on me!"

And the Sea said, "Lo, I breathe! but my breath
To some will be life, to others death!"
...

It was pleasant up the country, Mr. Banjo, where you went,
For you sought the greener patches and you travelled like a gent;
And you curse the trams and buses and the turmoil and the push,...

By the City Dead-House, by the gate,
As idly sauntering, wending my way from the clangor,
I curious pause for lo! an outcast form, a poor dead prostitute brought;...

Dear city in the moonlight dreaming,
How changed and lovely is your face;
Where is the sordid busy scheming
That filled all day the market-place?

Was it but fancy that a rabble...

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest....

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider
...

A City Mouse, with ways polite,
A Country Mouse invited
To sup with him and spend the night.
Said Country Mouse: "De - lighted!"
In truth it proved a royal treat,
With everything that's good to eat....

"Here was a people whom after their works
thou shalt see wept over for their lost dominion:
and in this palace is the last information
respecting lords collected in the dust.",
The Arabian Nights.
...

Wide-walled it stands in heathen lands
Beside a mystic sea,
With streets strange-trod of many a god,
And templed blasphemy.

Far in the night, a rose of light
It shines beside the sea;...

'Per me si va nella citt' dolente.'
- Dante

'Poi di tanto adoprar, di tanti moti
D'ogni celeste, ogni terrena cosa,
Girando senza posa,
Per tornar sempre l' donde son mosse;...

The stranger came from Narromine and made his little joke--
"They say we folks in Narromine are narrow-minded folk.
But all the smartest men down here are puzzled to define...

Would you like to see a city given over,
Soul and body, to a tyrannising game?
If you would, there's little need to be a rover,
For St. Andrews is the abject city's name.
...

("The Brushwood Boy", The Day's Work)


Over the edge of the purple down,
Where the single lamplight gleams,
Know ye the road to the Merciful Town
That is hard by the Sea of Dreams,...

Beside the pounding cataracts
Of midnight streams unknown to us
'Tis builded in the leafless tracts
And valleys huge of Tartarus.
Lurid and lofty and vast it seems;
It hath no rounded name that rings,...