Colour, thick as dust, lay Spattered about the highway-- Colour so bright that one would think White, blue, cherry-pink Were made to clutch and drink, Colour that made one stop and say, ‘Earth, are you Heaven to-day?’ Colour that made one pray. Lumps of colour, liquid and cool, Cool and near, Clear and gay Tumbled about my way.
You came, but still, with heart full-given to gladness, I paused, as one stands stricken ere he falls; Not yet my fumblings swept their bounds, clogged sense its Weakling walls.
Quaint spaceless musings held me--idiot Mind was Gaped and gilled like a fish to suck through slow Tentative pores swift sweetness of strange waters’ Ebb and flow.
Yet how could I praise in darkness?--Life, like a sodded Seed, moved in drought-sleep and cleft its clay Freshly it seemed, though each sap-season spired its Stalks into day:
Till now (ah, deft magician!) your wand hovers Over all Spirit--over those lost grey fields Where one frail flower, with burning stem, glad, gradual Petals yields;
And whose past pitiful bitter blooms live only In the flushed mockery of remembering lovers.
The yellow sky grows vivid as the sun, The sea glittering, and the hills dun.
The stones quiver. Twenty pounds of lead Fold upon fold, the air laps my head.
Both eyes scorch: tongue stiff and bitter. Flies buzz, but no birds twitter:
Slow bullocks stand with stinging feet, And naked fishes scarcely stir, for heat.
White as smoke, As jetted steam, dead clouds awoke And quivered on the Western rim. And then the singing started, dim And sibilant as rime-stiff reeds That whistle as the wind leads. The North answered, low and clear; The South whispered hard and sere, And thunder muffled up like drums Beat, whence the East-wind comes. The heavy sky that could not weep Is loosened: rain falls steep, And thirty singing furies ride To split the sky from side to side. They sing, and lash the wet-flanked wind: Sing, from Col to Hafod Mynd And fling their voices half a score Of miles along the mounded shore: Whip loud music from a tree, And roll their paean out to sea Where crowded breakers fling and leap, And strange things throb five fathoms deep.
The sudden tempest roared and died: The singing furies muted ride Down wet and slippery roads to hell; And, silent in their captors’ train Two fishers, storm-caught on the main; A shepherd, battered with his flocks; A pit-boy tumbled from the rocks, A dozen back-broke gulls, and hosts Of shadowy, small, pathetic ghosts, Of mice and leverets caught by flood, Their beauty shrouded in cold mud.