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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  John Gould Fletcher

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

La Salle Street—Evening

John Gould Fletcher

From “Chicago Notes”

THE FAÇADES glower bleakly,

Each one a successive fiat.

They oppose with unwearied sombreness

The greenish light of the sky.

They extend themselves frontally:

Immense stubborn cliffs of fatality,

Motionless summits of denial,

Striving with silent ambition

To crush the last glimmer out.

People go hastily beneath them with embittered glances.

They do not heed the throng,

They do not hesitate at all:

Their treasuries are locked and barred behind triple-brazed armor of steel.

They are an army in massive alignment:

We are the trampled grass quivering beneath their feet.