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A Winter Landscape
To Mrs. Percy Jackson
I THE SEVEN white peacocks against the castle wall | |
| In the high trees and the dusk are like tapestry; | |
| The sky being orange, the high wall a purple barrier, | |
| The canal dead silver in the dusk: | |
| And you are far away. | 5 |
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| Yet I see infinite miles of mountains, | |
| Little lights shining in rows in the dark of them— | |
| Infinite miles of marshes; | |
| Thin wisps of mist, shimmering like blue webs | |
| Over the dusk of them. | 10 |
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| Great curves and horns of sea, | |
| And dusk and dusk, and the little village; | |
| And you, sitting in the firelight. | |
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II Around me are the two hundred and forty men of B Company, | |
| Mud-colored; | 15 |
| Going about their avocations, | |
| Resting between their practice of the art | |
| Of killing men; | |
| As I too rest between my practice | |
| Of the art of killing men. | 20 |
| Their pipes glow over the mud and their mud-color, moving like fireflies beneath the trees— | |
| I too being mud-colored— | |
| Beneath the trees and the peacocks. | |
| When they come up to me in the dusk | |
| They start, stiffen and salute, almost invisibly. | 25 |
| And the forty-two prisoners from the battalion guard-room | |
| Crouch over the tea-cans in the shadow of the wall. | |
| And the bread hunks glimmer, beneath the peacocks— | |
| And you are far away. | |
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III Presently I shall go in. | 30 |
| I shall write down the names of the forty-two | |
| Prisoners in the battalion guard-room | |
| On fair white foolscap: | |
| Their names, rank and regimental numbers; | |
| Corps, Companies, Punishments and Offences, | 35 |
| Remarks, and By whom confined. | |
| Yet in spite of all I shall see only | |
| The infinite miles of dark mountain, | |
| The infinite miles of dark marshland, | |
| Great curves and horns of sea, | 40 |
| The little village; | |
| And you, | |
| Sitting in the firelight. | |
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