When you went, how was it you carried with you <br />My missal book of fine, flamboyant hours? <br />My book of turrets and of red-thorn bowers, <br />And skies of gold, and ladies in bright tissue? <br /> <br />Now underneath a blue-grey twilight, heaped <br />Beyond the withering snow of the shorn fields <br />Stands rubble of stunted houses; all is reaped <br />And garnered that the golden daylight yields. <br /> <br />Dim lamps like yellow poppies glimmer among <br />The shadowy stubble of the under-dusk, <br />As farther off the scythe of night is swung, <br />And little stars come rolling from their husk. <br /> <br />And all the earth is gone into a dust <br />Of greyness mingled with a fume of gold, <br />Covered with aged lichens, past with must, <br />And all the sky has withered and gone cold. <br /> <br />And so I sit and scan the book of grey, <br />Feeling the shadows like a blind man reading, <br />All fearful lest I find the last words bleeding <br />With wounds of sunset and the dying day.<br /><br />David Herbert Lawrence<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/grey-evening-2/
