Transitional Poem
47
I have seen what impertinenceStokes up the dingy rhetoric of sense:I've seen your subaltern ambitions riseYellow and parallelAs smoke from garden cities that soon fadesIn air it cannot even defile. Poor shades,Not black enough for hell,Learn of this poplar which beyond its heightAspires not, and will bend beneath the thumbOf every wind; yet when the stars comeIt is an omen darker than the night.
The rest may go. No satisfaction liesIn such. And you alone shall hearMy pride, whose love's the accurate frontierOf all my enterprise.While your beauties' successionHolds my adventure in a flowery chainAs the spring hedgerows hold the lane,How can I care whether it ends uponMarsh or metropolis?
But look within my heart, see thereThe tough stoic ghost of a pride was too severeTo risk an armisticeWith lesser powers than death; but rather died
