| |
| HARD by the docks, soon as the shadows fold | |
| The dizzy mansion-fronts that soar aloft, | |
| When eyes of lamps are burning soft, | |
| The shy, dark quarter lights again its old | |
| Allurement of red vice and gold. | 5 |
| |
| Women, blocks of heaped, blown meat, | |
| Stand on low thresholds down the narrow street, | |
| Calling to every man that passes; | |
| Behind them, at the end of corridors, | |
| Shine fires, a curtain stirs | 10 |
| And gives a glimpse of masses | |
| Of mad and naked flesh in looking-glasses. | |
| Hard by the docks | |
| The street upon the left is ended by | |
| A tangle of high masts and shrouds that blocks | 15 |
| A sheet of sky; | |
| Upon the right a net of grovelling alleys | |
| Falls from the town—and here the black crowd rallies | |
| And reels to rotten revelry. | |
| |
| It is the flabby, fulsome butcher’s stall of luxury, | 20 |
| Time out of mind erected on the frontiers | |
| Of the city and the sea. | |
| |
| Far-sailing melancholy mariners | |
| Who, wet with spray, thru grey mists peer, | |
| Cabin-boys cradled among the rigging, and they who steer | 25 |
| Hallucinated by the blue eyes of the vast sea-spaces, | |
| All dream of it, evoke it when the evening falls; | |
| Their raw desire to madness galls; | |
| The wind’s soft kisses hover on their faces; | |
| The wave awakens rolling images of soft embraces; | 30 |
| And their two arms implore | |
| Stretched in a frantic cry towards the shore. | |
| |
| And they of offices and shops, the city tribes, | |
| Merchants precise, keen reckoners, haggard scribes, | |
| Who sell their brains for hire, and tame their brows, | 35 |
| When the keys of desks are hanging on the wall, | |
| Feel the same galling rut at even-fall, | |
| And run like hunted dogs to the carouse. | |
| Out of the depths of dusk come their dark flocks, | |
| And in their hearts debauch so rudely shocks | 40 |
| Their ingrained greed and old accustomed care, | |
| That they are racked and ruined by despair. | |
| |
| It is the flabby, fulsome butcher’s stall of luxury, | |
| Time out of mind erected on the frontiers | |
| Of the city and the sea. | 45 |
| |
| Come from what far sea-isles or pestilent parts? | |
| Come from what feverish or methodic marts? | |
| Their eyes are filled with bitter, cunning hate, | |
| They fight their instincts that they cannot sate; | |
| Around red females who befool them, they | 50 |
| Herd frenzied till the dawn of sober day. | |
| The panelling is fiery with lewd art; | |
| Out of the wall nitescent knick-knacks dart; | |
| Fat Bacchuses and leaping satyrs in | |
| Wan mirrors freeze an unremitting grin.… | 55 |
| |
| And women with spent loins and sleeping croups | |
| Are piled on sofas and arm-chairs in groups, | |
| With sodden flesh grown vague, and black and blue | |
| With the first trampling of the evening’s crew. | |
| One of them slides a gold coin in her stocking; | 60 |
| Another yawns, and some their knees are rocking; | |
| Others by bacchanalia worn out, | |
| Feeling old age, and, sniffing them, Death’s snout, | |
| Stare with wide-open eyes, torches extinct, | |
| And smooth their legs with hands together linked.… | 65 |
| |
| It is the flabby, fulsome butcher’s stall of luxury, | |
| Wherein Crime plants his knives that bleed, | |
| Where lightning madness stains | |
| Foreheads with rotting pains, | |
| Time out of mind erected on frontiers that feed | 70 |
| The city and the sea. | |
| |
