So quiet it was in that high, sun-steeped room, <br />So warm and still, that sometimes with the light <br />Through the great windows, bright with bottle-panes, <br />There’d float a chime from clock-jacks out of sight, <br />Clapping iron mallets on green copper gongs. <br /> <br />But only in blown music from the town’s <br />Quaint horologe could Time intrude . . . you’d say <br />Clocks had been bolted out, the flux of years <br />Defied, and that high chamber sealed away <br />From earthly change by some old alchemist. <br /> <br />And, oh, those thousand towers of Nuremberg <br />Flowering like leaden trees outside the panes: <br />Those gabled roofs with smoking cowls, and those <br />Encrusted spires of stone, those golden vanes <br />On shining housetops paved with scarlet tiles! <br /> <br />And all day nine wrought-pewter manticores <br />Blinked from their spouting faucets, not five steps <br />Across the cobbled street, or, peering through <br />The rounds of glass, espied that sun-flushed room <br />With Dürer graving at intaglios. <br /> <br />O happy nine, spouting your dew all day <br />In green-scaled rows of metal, whilst the town <br />Moves peacefully below in quiet joy . . . <br />O happy gargoyles to be gazing down <br />On Albrecht Dürer and his plates of iron!<br /><br />Kenneth Slessor<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/nuremberg-2/
