POETRY.
ENCHANTMENTS OF THE MIDDLE AGE.
LONDON is beautiful, I know
Its sooty churches chalked with white, The quiet squares where plane-trees grow And lamplit street on rainy night.
Beauty of light and fog and dark, And yet my heart within me turns To lands in woodcut books I mark, For missal lands my spirit yearns.
Where everything is flat and bright With colours definite and clean, Where roads turn dazzlingly white Through forests square and neat and green.
Where hunt the lords of seigneuries Whose curved hounds unleashed to kill, Awake the columned silences
With baying strangely thin and shrill.
The little cities, twisted, tall, Stand up on hills more steep than high, Each red machicolated wall Seen clear against the clearer sky.
Paved places where the cypresses Slant shadows through the noonday glare, And where the brick-built belfries Make musical the evening air.
Where ladies walk demure and fair In head-dresses with steeple crowns, Severe and stiff and angular, In diapered and coloured gowns.
Thus every day and firm and bright Shone beauty ; by our modem eyes Seen only in the fitful light Of insubstantial ecstasies.
Devm CECIU
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