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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Richard Hughes

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

Dirge

Richard Hughes

TO those under smoke-blackened tiles, and cavernous echoing arches,

In tortuous hid courts where the roar never ceases

Of deep cobbled streets wherein dray upon dray ever marches,

The sky is a broken lid, a litter of smashed yellow pieces.

To those under mouldering tiles, where life to an hour is crowded—

Life, to a span of the floor, to an inch of the light;

And night is all feverous hot, a time to be bawded and rowdied:

Day is a time of grinding, that looks for rest to the night.

Those who would live, do it quickly; with quick tears, sudden laughter,

Quick oaths, terse blasphemous thoughts about God the Creator.

Those who would die, do it quickly; with noose from the rafter,

Or the black, shadowy eddies of Thames, the hurry-hater.

Life is the master, the keen and grim destroyer of beauty.

Death is a quiet and deep reliever, where soul upon soul

And wizened and thwarted body on body are loosed from their duty

Of living, and sink in a bottomless, edgeless, impalpable hole.

Dead, they can see far above them, as if from the depth of a pit,

Black on the glare small figures that twist and are shrivelled in it.