When you have wearied of the valiant spires of this County Town, <br />Of its wide white streets and glistening museums, and black monastic walls, <br />Of its red motors and lumbering trains, and self-sufficient people, <br />I will take you walking with me to a place you have not seen — <br />Half town and half country—the land of the Canal. <br />It is dearer to me than the antique town: I love it more than the rounded hills: <br />Straightest, sublimest of rivers is the long Canal. <br />I have observed great storms and trembled: I have wept for fear of the dark. <br />But nothing makes me so afraid as the clear water of this idle canal on a summer's noon. <br />Do you see the great telegraph poles down in the water, how every wire is distinct? <br />If a body fell into the canal it would rest entangled in those wires for ever, between earth and air. <br />For the water is as deep as the stars are high. <br />One day I was thinking how if a man fell from that lofty pole <br />He would rush through the water toward me till his image was scattered by his splash, <br />When suddenly a train rushed by: the brazen dome of the engine flashed: <br />the long white carriages roared; <br />The sun veiled himself for a moment, and the signals loomed in fog; <br />A savage woman screamed at me from a barge: little children began to cry; <br />The untidy landscape rose to life: a sawmill started; <br />A cart rattled down to the wharf, and workmen clanged over the iron footbridge; <br />A beautiful old man nodded from the first story window of a square red house, <br />And a pretty girl came out to hang up clothes in a small delightful garden. <br />O strange motion in the suburb of a county town: slow regular movement of the dance of death! <br />Men and not phantoms are these that move in light. <br />Forgotten they live, and forgotten die.<br /><br />James Elroy Flecker<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/oxford-canal/
