But, love, we are more beautiful than he. We have forgotten the grey sick yearning nights brushed off the old cobwebs of desire; we stand strong immortal as the slender brown boy who waits to row our boat to the island. But love how your steps drag. And what is this bundle of worn brocades I press so passionately to me? Old rags of the past, snippings of Helen's dress, of Melisande's, scarfs of old paramours rotted in the grave ages and ages since. No lake the ink yawns at me from the writing table. IX LA RUE DU TEMPS PASSE Far away where the tall grey houses fade A lamp blooms dully through the dusk, Through the effacing dusk that gently veils The traceried balconies and the wreaths Carved above the shuttered windows Of forgotten houses. Behind one of the crumbled garden walls A pale woman sits in drooping black And stares with uncomprehending eyes At the thorny angled twigs that bore Years ago in the moon-spun dusk One scarlet rose. In an old high room where the shadows troop On tiptoe across the creaking boards A shrivelled man covers endless sheets Rounding out in his flourishing hand Sentence after sentence loud With dead kings' names. Looking out at the vast grey violet dusk A pale boy sits in a window, a book Wide open on his knees, and fears With cold choked fear the thronging lives That lurk in the shadows and fill the dusk With menacing steps. Far away the gaslamp glows dull gold A vague tulip in the misty night. The clattering drone of a distant tram Grows loud and fades with a hum of wires Leaving the street breathless with silence, chill And the listening houses. _Bordeaux_ X _O douce Sainte Geneviève ramène moi a ta ville, Paris._ In the smoke of morning the bridges are dusted with orangy sunshine. Bending their black smokestacks far back muddling themselves in their spiralling smoke the tugboats pass under the bridges and behind them stately gliding smooth like clouds the barges come black barges with blunt prows spurning the water gently gently rebuffing the opulent wavelets of opal and topaz and sapphire, barges casually come from far towns towards far towns unhurryingly bound. The tugboats shrieks and shrieks again calling beyond the next bend and away. In the smoke of morning the bridges are dusted with orangy sunshine. _O douce Sainte Geneviève ramène moi a ta ville, Paris._ Big hairy-hoofed horses are drawing carts loaded with flour-sacks, white flour-sacks, bluish in the ruddy flush of the morning streets. On one cart two boys perch wrestling and their arms and faces glow ruddy against the white flour-sacks as the sun against the flour-white sky.