1
There is no space: turn the loud-speaker on!
The escaping trains that shriek by Arthur’s Seat,
The tinker’s bagpipe down the windy street,
The deep-throated sirens from the Forth are gone.
London’s without the window; Mayfair, Kew,
Stars at the Spaniards, crowds at Charing Cross,
Lights that in bacchanal beauty wheel and toss,
Underground, River, petrol-stench, and you.
We are not pent, as children by a nurse
For petty faults each in a separate room;
We are blindfold merely, touching hands through gloom
In this same little cell of the universe.
There is no space: for sonorous, lo, Big Ben
Annihilates distance on the stroke of ten!
2
There is no time: the round mechanical
Of the dial registers not changed hours in the heart.
The years I have lived are of myself a part,
Past minutes present still, stored, salvaged all.
Each record I may recapitulate
On my brain’s gramophone, every nursery tune,
Each madrigal of our enchanted noon,
Often rehearsed nor ever out of date.
Self changes not; still as at seven I’m shy,
As twenty passionate, as eleven bold,
At odds with the world. Grows any spirit old?
Stares not a questioning child from every eye?
There is no time: his pendulum’s still when we
Embracing trespass on eternity.
3
They have so frightened us with empty breath,
With names that have no substance, Space and Time,
Phantasms and words – how if we reach and climb
To find the emptiest word of all is Death?
Time, Space do us confine in loneliness
Not half so much as personality –
Webbed motive, baffling mood – hides you from me;
How if this Death divide us even less?
God never fathered myth. Space, Time’s a lie –
How if the mightiest enemy of love
Be found a lie all other lies above?
How if our souls from prison loosed shall cry,
When Space, the paper-barrier, perisheth,
And Time’s poor clockwork’s dumb: There is no Death!
1928