Poems (Henley)/Largo e Mesto
IV
Largo e mestoOut of the poisonous East,Over a continent of blight,Like a maleficent Influence releasedFrom the most squalid cellarage of hell,The Wind-Fiend, the abominable—The Hangman Wind that tortures temper and light—Comes slouching, sullen and obscene,Hard on the skirts of the embittered night;And in a cloud uncleanOf excremental humours, roused to strifeBy the operation of some ruinous change,Wherever his evil mandate run and range,Into a dire intensity of life,A craftsman at his bench, he settles downTo the grim job of throttling London Town.
So, by a jealous lightlessness besetThat might have oppressed the dragons of old time Crunching and groping in the abysmal slime,A cave of cut-throat thoughts and villainous dreams,Hag-rid and crying with cold and dirt and wet,The afflicted City, prone from mark to markIn shameful occultation, seemsA nightmare labyrinthine, dim and drifting,With wavering gulfs and antic heights, and shifting,Rent in the stuff of a material dark,Wherein the lamplight, scattered and sick and pale,Shows like the leper's living blotch of bale:Uncoiling monstrous into street on streetPaven with perils, teeming with mischance,Where man and beast go blindfold and in dread,Working with oaths and threats and faltering feetSomewhither in the hideousness ahead;Working through wicked airs and deadly dewsThat make the laden robber grin askanceAt the good places in his black romance,And the poor, loitering harlot rather chooseGo pinched and pined to bedThan lurk and shiver and curse her wretched wayFrom arch to arch, scouting some threepenny prey.
Forgot his dawns and far-flushed afterglows,His green garlands and windy eyots forgot, The old Father-River flows,His watchfires cores of menace in the gloom,As he came oozing from the Pit, and bore,Sunk in his filthily transfigured sides,Shoals of dishonoured dead to tumble and rotIn the squalor of the universal shore:His voices sounding through the gruesome airAs from the Ferry where the Boat of DoomWith her blaspheming cargo reels and rides:The while his children, the brave ships,No more adventurous and fair,Nor tripping it light of heel as home-bound brides,But infamously enchanted,Huddle together in the foul eclipse,Or feel their course by inches desperately,As through a tangle of alleys murder-haunted,From sinister reach to reach out—out—to sea.
And Death the while—Death with his well-worn, lean, professional smile,Death in his threadbare working trim—Comes to your bedside, unannounced and bland,And with expert, inevitable handFeels at your windpipe, fingers you in the lung, Or flicks the clot well into the labouring heart:Thus signifying unto old and young,However hard of mouth or wild of whim,'Tis time—'tis time by his ancient watch—to partFrom books and women and talk and drink and art.And you go humbly after himTo a mean suburban lodging: on the wayTo what or whereNot Death, who is old and very wise, can say:And you—how should you careSo long as, unreclaimed of hell,The Wind-Fiend, the insufferable,Thus vicious and thus patient, sits him downTo the black job of burking London Town?