Forget the masterpiece itself:

it cracks with watching;

a slow landslide

shoves at the pier-stones

and the black spars

of the ironwork built like joinery,

cranking the arch out

with a wader-bird’s leverage

meet to support less – only

a tarred, spongy walk

without even the trade

of a tourist’s fee.

The masterpiece is now

a standing elegy

masking its old truculence:

anyway, that past is shot.

Yet how we love a bridge –

bay-breaker or ditchplank,

a dry-eyed span –

Forget the thing itself, though,

now that it has to be

torn down for safety

or turned to a monument;

reverie all that can conjure

the bustle of the gorge then,

cargoes on the Severn,

smoke among the bluffs, sooty chimneys

starting from the wood:

now an empty railbed

tracks up the river’s course

past Coalport and Madeley –

rubbles of the enterprise

with gardens and hovels

collapsed into peace,

patched with fresh mortar,

with fresh cinders.

The sky opens to the north,

rods bow under elders;

on the valley, scorch-marks

look small and honourable.

But spit into the wind,

the century after next returns it:

to the played-out heap

colonies are coming.