Percy MacKaye

IN that Manhattan alley long yclept,

With gentle olden music, Maiden Lane,

Where sick and sad-eyed Traffic scarce has slept

Even at midnight, in her lust for gain,

Rolling in restive pain

Through the stern vigil of a century,

There, mid the din of harsh reality—

The newsboy’s shriek, car’s clang and huckster’s chaff,

The cobble’s roar, and the loud drayman’s laugh,

And the dull stare,

The inhuman, haunted glare

Of the faces—the grey faces

Of Mammon’s stark-mad races,

Sordid and slattern,

Modish and tattern,

Loveless in their misery—

There, in the midst of all,

Seated upon a stall,

Musing on meadows, Isaak, I met thee!—

How my heart stopped for too much happiness,

To meet thee there in that maelstrom of men,

Benignant, wise and calm! Ah, gently then

Came back, in fancy’s dress,

All that of old was sweet,

Serene and fair, to grace the garish street.

Musing on meadows now in Maiden Lane,

The turbid current surging at my side

Became the flow of Thames’ sequestered tide,

The newsboy’s cry waned to a curlew’s call,

The jangling pedlar tended tinkling sheep

Along green hedgerows; even the drayman’s brawl

Sweetened to an old soliloquy, till all

That strident world has chastened to a sleep

Where, in a twilit eddy of my dream,

Thine image, Isaak, pored upon a bream.