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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TO A TELEGRAPH POLE, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: The lanes are full of young men swallowing beer
Last Line: To ruin folk who trust.
Alternate Author Name(s): Maurice, Furnley
Subject(s): Telegraph; Telegrams


THE lanes are full of young men swallowing beer,
Some serious women ludicrously dressed
Watch autocars snort through the crush, in fear.
A railway train pants like a mammoth oppressed;
On a wind-gust
The swelling and failing moan of the street trams
Sounds through the stifling incense of the dust.
The wrecker signs flash out their blazoned shams,
Leading to doom who trust.

I saw you in your slender whiteness there;
I put my hand upon your painted side;
You quivered in a sudden mountain air
And I was back to where your friends abide.
The brown ferns sway,
And your long rustling fingers of soft green
Plash in the light and give the light away
Perfumed and tinted to small things I've seen
That seldom touch pure day.

For your are joyous, beautiful, unbowed;
A thousand violets cluster at your feet;
The lark has lent her music to a cloud
So she might make your coronet fittingly sweet,
And you, I swear,
Were never dragged across these splendid hills,
Nor heard the lash thud on a sullen steer;
The low, amazing light that slowly fills
These groves saw not your bier.

Tenderly moves the dusk along the ways,
There's water falling through a phantom light,
A pungent smell of greenwood in a blaze
Whose frantic flame stabs at the coming night.
Unfold the packs!
To-morrow comes rolling in behind the moon,
The rabbits are out, the 'possums hunch their backs;
No songs to-night, we must be breaking soon
Along the morning tracks.

The forest silences are gathering,
Mute is the thrush, the cricket in the grass,
A brown leaf falls, flutters a frightened wing,
Into the gloom the folded ranges pass,
Sleep, and all's well!
Amid the ferns, maybe, there moves a ghost,
A gleaming axe; a portent; who can tell?
You are amongst the creatures God loves most --
I know you never fell.

Somewhere in a faint world away from here
Or there; in this or some forgotten time
Pale autocars pant through a crush in fear,
The railway trains smash out a metal rhyme.
On a wind-gust
The swelling and failing moan of the street trams
Sounds through a veiling incense of the dust;
The will-o'-the-wisps glimmer their blazoned shams
To ruin folk who trust.





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