A Ruined Railroad
As the old roads, rubbed clean by wheel or hoof, Chafed by the blue and scarlet waggons, and ringing With bell or the echoing shout of coachman's horn, Sink now under the bramble and the rose, Are lost, lost beneath the nettle's root And as the clean, sharp flash of canals, that flaunt Their painted barge, the Castle and the Rose, The clank of chain and the mid-day creak of leather From harness burnt in bygone midsummer suns, Are clotted by the weed's slow, green corrosion, So, too, the track over which, panting and sleek With brass, like a horse loaded with all his bells, The engine throbbed, or paused by drowsy halts Where all the summer dreamed in sun-warped wood, Is lost ; the little stations with quiet names More desolate than the tracks the Romans trod ;
And lonely as ruins where the yellow-lipped
Toadflax nods and sneers, lolled on its side The broken locomotive lies forgotten, Its bright wheels dimmed by the bindweed's loops of green
MARGARET STANLEY-WRENCH.
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