|
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 |
|
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 |
|
Great curves and horns of sea, | |
And dusk and dusk, and the little village; | |
And you, sitting in the firelight. | |
|
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. | |
|
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. | |
|