"In vain," the girl repeats, "in vain, in vain ..." Your suburb's whole philosophy leads there. The ox-stall for our happiness, for pain, Poignant and sweet, the dull narcotic ache Of wretchedness, and in resigned despair A grim contentment ... ashen fruits to slake A nameless, quenchless thirst. The tinkling rain Of that small sentimental music wets Your parching suburb: it may sprout ... who knows?... In something red and silken like a rose, In sheaves of almost genuine violets. Faint chords, your sadness, secular, immense, Brims to the bursting this poor Actual heart. For surging through the floodgates that the sense On sudden lightly opens sweeps the Whole Into the narrow compass of its part. <i>He.</i> Inedited sensation of the soul! You'd have us bless the Hire-Purchase System, Which now allows the poorest vampers To feel, as they abuse their piano's dampers, That angels have stooped down and kissed 'em With Ave-Maries from the infinite. But poor old Infinite's dead. Long live his heir, Lord Here-and-Now ... for all the rest Is windy nothingness, or at the best Home-made Chimera, bodied with despair, Headed with formless, foolish hope. <i>She.</i> No, no! We live in verse, for all things rhyme With something out of space and time. <i>He.</i> But in the suburb here life needs must flow In journalistic prose ... <i>She.</i> But we have set Our faces towards the further hills, where yet The wind untainted and unbound may blow. II. FROM THE CREST. So through the squalor, till the sky unfolds To right and left its fringes, penned no more, A thin canal, 'twixt shore and ugly shore Of hovels, poured contiguous from the moulds Of Gothic horror. Town is left at last, Save for the tentacles that probe,... a squat Dun house or two, allotments, plot on plot Of cabbage, jejune, ripe or passed, Chequering with sick yellow or verdigris The necropolitan ground; and neat paved ways That edge the road ... the town's last nerves ... and cease, As if in sudden shame, where hedges raise Their dusty greenery on either hand. Their path mounts slowly up the hill; And, as they walk, to right and left expand The plain and the golden uplands and the blue Faint smoke of distances that fade from view; And at their feet, remote and still? The city spreads itself. <i>He.</i>