I had been an hour at Lyons. My breath comes <br />Fast when I think of it. An hour, no more, <br />I trod those streets and listened to the drums, <br />The mirth, the music, and the city's roar, <br />And found no sermon for me in her stones. <br />It was the evening of St. Martin's fair, <br />And all the world, its working bees and drones, <br />Had gone out to the quays in the sweet air, <br />To taste that thing more sweet to human breath, <br />Its own mad laughter at its own mad kind. <br />``An hour of prayer,'' I mused, ``for men of faith.'' <br />Yet all these worshippers were only blind. <br />And I, no whit less blind, among them went <br />In search of pleasure for my punishment.<br /><br />Wilfrid Scawen Blunt<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/esther-a-sonnet-sequence-v/
