Cover image for

Alarms and Discursions

Language English
Published 1910
Word count 50,746
Excerpt

relinquished but your earthly sight, To hold you dear in a more distant way. I'll love the 'buses lumbering through the wet, Even more than when I lightly tripped as they. The grimy colour of the London clay Is lovely yet,'

"because I have found the house where I was really born; the tall and quiet house from which I can see London afar off, as the miracle of man that it is."


The Nightmare

A sunset of copper and gold had just broken down and gone to pieces in the west, and grey colours were crawling over everything in earth and heaven; also a wind was growing, a wind that laid a cold finger upon flesh and spirit. The bushes at the back of my garden began to whisper like conspirators; and then to wave like wild hands in signal. I was trying to read by the last light that died on the lawn a long poem of the decadent period, a poem about the old gods of Babylon and Egypt, about their blazing and obscene temples, their cruel and colossal faces.

"Or didst thou love the God of Flies wh