Now from my window-sill I watch the night,
The church clock’s yellow face, the green pier light
Burn for a new imprudent year;
The silence buzzes in my ear;
The jets in both the dormitories are out.
Under the darkness nothing seems to stir;
The lilac bush like a conspirator
Shams dead upon the lawn, and there
Above the flagstaff the Great Bear
Hangs as a portent over Helensburgh.
But deaf to prophecy or China’s drum
The blood moves strangely in its moving home,
Diverges, loops, to travel further
Than the long still shadow of the father,
Though to the valley of regret it come.
Now in this season when the ice is loosened,
In scrubbed laboratories research is hastened
And cameras at the growing wood
Are pointed; for the long-lost good
Desire like a police-dog is unfastened.
O Lords of Limit, training dark and light
And setting a tabu ‘twixt left and right,
The influential quiet twins
From whom all property begins,
Look leniently upon us all tonight.
Oldest of masters whom the schoolboy fears,
Failing to find his pen or keep back tears,
Collecting stamps or butterflies,
Hoping in some way to appease
The malice of the erratic examiners,
No one has seen you: none can say;-“Of late-
Here. You can see the marks-They lay in wait.’
But in my thoughts tonight you seem
Forms which I saw once in a dream,
The stocky keepers of a wild estate.
With guns beneath your arms, in sun and wet,
At doorways posted or on ridges set,
By copse or bridge we know you there
Whose sleepless presences endear
Our peace to us with a perpetual threat.
We know you moody, silent, sensitive,
Quick to be offended, slow to forgive,
But to your discipline the heart
Submits when we have fallen apart
Into the isolated dishonest life.
Look not too closely, be not over-quick;
We have no invitation, but we are sick,
Using the mole’s device, the carriage
Of peacock or rat’s desperate courage,
And we shall only pass you by a trick.
At the end of my corridor are boys who dream
Of a new bicycle or winning team;
On their behalf guard all the more
This late-maturing Northern shore,
Who to their serious season must shortly come.
Deeper towards the summer the year moves on.
What if the starving visionary have seen
The carnival within our gates,
Your bodies kicked about the streets,
We need your power still: use it, that none,
O, from their tables break uncontrollably away,
Lunging, insensible to injury,
Dangerous in the room, or out wildly
Spinning like a top in the field,
Mopping and mowing through the sleepless day.