Aspidistra Street
Aspidistra Street
Original Text
Strange Meetings: Poems By Harold Monro (Wiltshire: Laurel Books, 2003): 77.
1Go along that road, and look at sorrow.
2Every window grumbles.
3All day long the drizzle fills the puddles,
4Trickles in the runnels and the gutters,
5Drips and drops and dripples, and drops and dribbles,
6While the melancholy aspidistra
7Frowns between the parlour curtains.
8Uniformity, dull Master!–
9Birth and marriage, middle-age and death;
10Rain and gossip: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday …
11Sure, the lovely fools who made Utopia
12Planned it without any aspidistra.
13There will be a heaven on earth, but first
14We must banish from the parlour
15Plush and poker-work and paper flowers,
16Brackets, staring photographs and what-nots,
17Serviettes, frills and etageres,
18Anti-macassars, vases, chiffoniers;
19And the gloomy aspidistra
20Glowering through the window-pane,
21Meditating heavy maxims,
22Moralising to the rain.
Publication Notes
Collected Poems, ed. Alida Monro, with prefaces by F. S. Flint and T. S. Eliot (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1933): 130
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2004
Rhyme
Form