Classic Poem

The summer fields shone quiet: and I stood
And cursed them: bloom of hedge and bud of tree
And bright and high behind the hunch-backed wood
The thunder and the splendour of the sea.

Bring back the Babylon where I was born
The wheels that grind bring back, the hands that grope
And noise and blood and suffocating scorn
An eddy of fierce faces — and a hope

That 'mid those million heads one head find place
With brown hair curled like breakers of a sea,
And two eyes set so strangely in the face
That all things else are nothing suddenly.