STOPPING PLACE

THE world grows furry, grunts with sleep ... But I must on the surface keep. The jolting of the train to me Seems some primeval vertebræ Attached by life-nerves to my brain— Reactionary once again. So that I see shapes crude and new And ordered,—with some end in view, No longer with the horny eyes Of other people’s memories. Through highly varnished yellow heat, As through a lens that does not fit, The faces jolt in cubes, and I Perceive their odd solidity And lack of meaning absolute: For why should noses thus protrude, And to what purpose can relate Each hair so oddly separate? Anchored against the puff of breeze, As shallow as the crude blue seas, The coloured blocks and cubes of faces Seem Noah’s arks that shelter races Of far absurdities to breed Their queer kind after we are dead. Blue wooden foliage creaks with heat And there are woollen buns to eat— Bright-varnished buns to touch and see And, black as an Inferno, tea. Then (Recketts’ blue) a puff of wind.... Heredity regains my mind And I am sitting in the train While thought becomes like flesh,—the brain Not independent, but derived From hairy matter that half lived— Identities not round or whole. A questing beast who thirsts for soul, The furry vegetation there— Purring with heat, sucks in the air; And dust that’s gathered in the train, Protecting flesh, seems almost brain— (That horny substance altering sight); How strange, intangible is light Whence all is born, and yet by touch We live,—the rest is not worth much.... Once more the world grows furred with sleep,— But I must on the surface keep While mammoths from the heat are born— Great clumsy trains with tusk and horn Whereon the world’s too sudden tossed Through frondage of our mind, and lost.