OXFORD CANAL
A savage woman screamed at me from a barge: little children began to cry;
The untidy, unfinished land began to move: a saw-mill started;
A cart rattled down to the wharf, and workmen clanged over the iron foot-bridge;
A beautiful old man nodded from the first-story window of a square red house,
And a pretty girl came out to hang up clothes in a small delightful garden.
O strange motion in the suburb of a County Town: slow, regular movement of the dance of death!
No phantoms move in the light: more terrible than phantoms, they are men.
Theirs is no romance of great cities, or stupendous crimes; nor do they live on wild poetic moors.
Forgotten they live, and forgotten die.
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