Classic Poem

The Subway

I

Crowds pour down from the street and out of the locals,
A turbulent, tossing, rushing, surging stream,
Choked and dammed on the narrow, congested platform
Into a seething, eddying, heaving pool;
Crowds pour down from the street and out of the locals,
And up the stairs and down and from the express,
Wriggling, squeezing, squirming, panting and breathless,
They push and pull and jostle and jam and swarm:
The scuffle of feet, the solid impact of bodies,
The sharp staccato of swiftly slamming doors:
Over and over again the raucous order
Harsh from the throat of the melting, grimy guard —
" Watch-step — watch-step — watch-step — watch-step-step-lively! " —
Like a neighbor's cracked, unceasing gramophone.
He wedges and fits and packs with swift precision,
Shoves and shoulders and crams and crushes them in,
And slides the door on the heaving, struggling bodies,
Cutting away the hapless, overflowing,
As a pastry cook trims off the edge of a pie.
Crowds pour down from the street and out of the locals,
They push and pull and jostle and jam and swarm,
Tired people with fretful pallid faces,
Fighting their way in silence, tense and grim,
Obsessed, intent, unheeding, dogged and joyless, —
A fierce and virulent form of the verb To Go! —
Pushing, fighting, jamming —

On the coast of Maine
Little hollow houses
Are graying in the rain
Ghostly in the moonlight,
Bleaching in the sun;
Pitiful with emptiness,
For their day is done.

II

The platform, now remembered, seems a haven, —
Compared with the coach, a cool, and spacious place.
The breathless, throbbing heat is horrifying;
The heat ... the heat ... the wilting, relentless heat.
They sit or stand, relaxed and limp, enduring
The torrid hyphen that bridges work and home:
Some irate and some in a pallid patience,
Pale people and people shining and red.
There is a small dark girl in a mussy middy, —
A middy blouse that makes you think of the sea —
The tumbling sea with crisping crests of foam —
Salt, stinging spray and bravely shining brass
And gay, striped awnings — suppers on the deck —
But she had worn it to work for many days,
And she looks as if she never had seen the sea.
There are dull-eyed girls whose gallant rouge and powder
Are cut by crooked water-ways of sweat.
The stifling, choking heat is horrifying;
The heat ... the heat ... the merciless, melting heat.
A standing woman is gasping and going to faint;
She lets the handle go and sags inertly,
But she isn't going to fall; there isn't room,
For she is glued between a tipsy sailor
And a sallow, shaking wraith with a bandaged head.
The air is stale and dead and hotter ... hotter ...
Breathing is baffled by fluffy puffs of heat
From the crushed and steaming mass of human cattle,
Wedged in, body to body and breath to breath.
Stifling, gasping, reeking —

Westward, cool and dry ,
Miles and miles of prairie
Roll up against the sky;
Sun-cured and radiant,
Redolent and keen,
Wide and free beyond the gaze
Wind-swept and clean.

III

Rattle and crash and roar of the rapid transit,
Mad modern music, built on the theme of speed;
Single noises and noises welded together,
With one out-standing in discord, over all,
Until in the jaded brain it hums and pierces
Like the sly, burrowing buzz of the dentist's drill.
There are glaring lights which make the noise seem louder, —
The lurid glow of a fierce electric noon:
There are signs which draw the tired eyes up like magnets,
Strident signs which are noises visualized;
You cannot evade or dodge them, — loud, insistent,
Insolent signs, determined to be read.
They scream of somebody's soup and soap and garters,
Somebody's pajamas and tea and cigarettes,
And somebody's gloves and gum and flour and tonic,
Somebody's whisky and collars and breakfast food.
The eyes that read must run from color to color,
Stabbed and prodded with yellow and rasping red
Until with the jolt and jar of the frantic going
Is mingled the crash of unrelated tones.
There are reds and blues and yellows that are noises
And noises that are yellow and blue and red;
The senses of sight and sound are nagged and goaded,
Noise in the eyes as harsh as noise in the ears;
The rushing roar of the crazy speed enhances
The garishness of the bright and glaring gloom.

Jolting, rasping, screeching —

Over hill and plain
There is sanctuary,
Inviolate and still;
There is hush and healing;
Dimly green, afar,
Stand the forest places,
Silent as a star.English