All the slow school hours, round the irregular hum
of
the class,
Have pressed immeasurable spaces of hoarse
silence
Muffling my mind, as snow muffles the sounds that pass
Down the soiled street. We have pattered the lessons
ceaselessly —
But the faces of the boys, in the brooding, yellow
light
Have shone for me like a crowded constellation of stars.
Like full-blown flowers dimly shaking at the night,
Like floating froth on an ebbing shore in the
moon.
Out of each star, dark, strange beams that
disquiet:
In the open depths of each flower, dark restless drops:
Twin bubbles, shadow-full of mystery and challenge in
the foam’s whispering riot:
— How can I answer the challenge of so many
eyes!
The thick snow is crumpled on the roof, it plunges down
Awfully. Must I call back those hundred eyes? — A voice
Wakes from the hum, faltering about a noun —
My question! My God, I must break from this hoarse silence
That rustles beyond the stars to me. — There,
Ihave startled a hundred eyes, and I must look
Them an answer back. It is more than I can
bear.
The snow descends as if the dull sky shook
In flakes of shadow down; and through the gap
Between the ruddy schools sweeps one black
rook.
The rough snowball in the playground stands huge and
still
With fair flakes settling down on it. — Beyond, the town
Is lost in the shadowed silence the skies
distil.
And all things are possessed by silence, and they can
brood
Wrapped up in the sky’s dim space of hoarse silence
Earnestly — and oh for me this class is a bitter
rood.
II