Poems By William Bell Scott. Ballads, Studies from Nature, Sonnets, etc. Illustrated by Seventeen Etchings by the Author and L. Alma Tadema |
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THE MIDNIGHT CITY.
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197
THE MIDNIGHT CITY.
Past these tall houses and closed doors we wind,
Nor ever any living thing we meet,
Along each dimly lamp-lit, clean-swept street:
Bolted and barred within, the human kind,
Like Egypt's mummied dead, lie still and blind,
Stretched out beneath the hands of sleep and night;—
Will they indeed re-wake with morning's light?
An awful thing this lifeless town I find.
Nor ever any living thing we meet,
Along each dimly lamp-lit, clean-swept street:
Bolted and barred within, the human kind,
Like Egypt's mummied dead, lie still and blind,
Stretched out beneath the hands of sleep and night;—
Will they indeed re-wake with morning's light?
An awful thing this lifeless town I find.
'Tis strange to think too, eons long ago,
Ere any eyes or any hearts were here,
These stars shone out the same—unnumbered, clear;
And at this moment where warm breezes blow,
Filling the sails that left our quays last year,
The sun lights up another hemisphere!
Ere any eyes or any hearts were here,
These stars shone out the same—unnumbered, clear;
And at this moment where warm breezes blow,
Filling the sails that left our quays last year,
The sun lights up another hemisphere!
| Poems | |