Volume 158 — THE DEAD TREE.

Slushy is the highway between the unspeakable hedges; I pause Irresolute under a telegraph-pole, The fourteenth telegraph-pole on the way From Shere to Havering, The twenty-first From Havering to Shere. Crimson is the western sky; upright it stands, The solitary pole, Sombre and terrible, Splitting the dying sun Into two semi-circular halves. I do not think I have seen, not even in Vorticist pictures, Anything so solitary, So absolutely nude; Yet this was an item once in the uninteresting forest, With branches sticking out of it, and crude green leaves And resinous sap, And underneath it a litter of pine spindles And ants; Birds fretted in the boughs and bees were busy in it, Squirrels ran noisily up it; Now it is naked and dead, Delightfully naked And beautifully dead. Delightfully and beautifully, for across it melodiously, Stirred by the evening wind, The wires where electric messages are continually being despatched Between various post-offices, Messages of business and messages of love, Rates of advertisements and all the winners, Are vibrating and thrumming Like a thousand lutes. Is the old grey heart of the telegraph pole stirred by these messages? I fancy not. Yet it all seems very strange; And even stranger still, now that I notice it, Is the fact that the thing is after all not absolutely naked, For a short way up it, half obliterated with age, Discoloured and torn, Fastened on by tintacks, There is a paper affiche Relating to swine fever. The sun sinks lower and I pass on, On to the fifteenth pole from Shere to Havering, And the twentieth From Havering to Shere; It is even more naked and desolate than the last. I pause (as before)....