Under a sky of uncreated mud

or sunk beneath the accursed streets, my life

is added up of cupboard-musty weeks

and ring’d about with walls of ugliness:

some narrow world of ever-streaming air.

My days of azure have forgotten me.

Nought stirs, in garret-chambers of my brain,

except the squirming brood of miseries

older than memory, while, far out of sight

behind the dun blind of the rain, my dreams

of sun on leaves and waters drip thro’ years

nor stir the slumbers of some sullen well,

beneath whose corpse-fed weeds I too shall sink.

 

1895