London II
London II
Original Text
Bell, Julian. Work from the Winter and Other Poems. London: Hogarth Press, 1936: 25.
1Emptiness unsatisfied
2The hollow wind shifts inside.
3So life is this? well, I shall try
4A little longer: take my share;
5And then resume more native air
6And let this world of things go by.
7Back to childhood: once despised
8Refuge of the fact-tyrannised.
9But now my hold on solid fact
10Weakens, and all will to act.
11And how I long to know again
12That early and immediate reign.
13Now sight begins to grime and waste
14And smell to drown on the windy stone,
15Touch comes not, now withers taste,
16Ear turns interpreter alone;
17My solid world to misty dreaming
18And equal real each nightmare's seeming.
19They are all gone, life's vivid motion,
20Sense, excitement, struggle, pain;
21Blank lines roll out time's revolution
22And revived revolve again.
23Nothing to do, nowhere to go,
24No point at all in being at all,
25Not worth saying, nothing to know,
26No point in anything at all.
27I want--I don't want--the not wanting
28Leaves the need, but stops the acting,
29Nothing worth the winning or saving,
30And the narrow life contracting.
31And the thin trickle in the dirty ground
32"Runs with a dull, unvaried, saddening sound."
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire, assisted by Ana Berdinskikh
RPO Edition
2009