D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930). New Poems. 1916.
26. Embankment at Night, before the War
Outcasts.T
Comes endlessly kissing my face and my hands.
Lamps, is rayed with golden bands
Half way down its heaving sides;
Revealed where it hides.
Great electric cars
Sing through, and each with a floor-light racing along at its side.
Far off, oh, midge after midge
Drifts over the gulf that bars
The night with silence, crossing the lamp-touched tide.
Sleep in a row the outcasts,
Packed in a line with their heads against the wall.
Their feet, in a broken ridge
Stretch out on the way, and a lout casts
A look as he stands on the edge of this naked stall.
Their faces in their flank; so these
Have huddled rags or limbs on the naked sleep.
Save, as the tram-cars hover
Past with the noise of a breeze
And gleam as of sunshine crossing the low black heap,
Bare and asleep,
Two pale clots swept and swept by the light of the cars.
Foam-clots showing between
The long, low tidal-heap,
The mud-weed opening two pale, shadowless stars.
Passes the gallivant beam of the trams;
Shows in only two sad places
The white bare bone of our shams.
With a face like a chickweed flower.
And a heavy woman, sleeping still keeping
Callous and dour.
Tossed on the low, black, ruffled heap
Passes the light of the tram as it races
Out of the deep.
In disarray
Sleep-suave limbs of a youth with long, smooth thighs
Hutched up for warmth; the muddy rims
Of trousers fray
On the thin bare shins of a man who uneasily lies.
As red and dirty, bare
Young birds forsaken and left in a nest of mud—
Newspaper sheets enclose
Some limbs like parcels, and tear
When the sleeper stirs or turns on the ebb of the flood—
Of a woman’s knees
As she thrusts them upward under the ruffled skirt—
And a curious dearth of sound
In the presence of these
Wastrels that sleep on the flagstones without any hurt.
Stark on the heap
Travels the light as it tilts in its paces
Gone in one leap.
Stand those that wait
For a place to lie down; and still as they stand, they sleep,
Wearily catching
The flood’s slow gait
Like men who are drowned, but float erect in the deep.
Golden-lighted tall
Trams that pass, blown ruddily down the night!
The bridge on its stanchions
Stoops like a pall
To this human blight.
Theatre people pass,
Holding aloft their umbrellas that flash and are bright
Like flowers of infernal moly
Over nocturnal grass
Wetly bobbing and drifting away on our sight.
Row of shattered feet,
Outcasts keep guard.
Forgotten,
Forgetting, till fate shall delete
One from the ward.
Are beautifully laid in black on a gold-grey sky.
The river’s invisible tide
Threads and thrills like ore that is wealth to the eye.
Cross the chasm
At the bridges
Above intertwined plasm.