Harold Monro
I search the room with all
my mind,
Peering among those eyes;
For I am feverish to find
brain may talk,
Not that I think myself too
wise,
But that I’m lonely, and I
walk
Round the large place and
wonder. No —
There’s nobody, I fear,
Lonely as I, and here.
How they hate me. I’m a
fool:
at pool;
I cannot drone a comic son;
I can’t talk shop; I can’t use
slang;
My jokes are bad, my stories
long;
My voice will falter, break
or hang,
Not blurt the sour sarcastic
word—
And so my swearing sounds
absurd.
Three or four others for an
argument.
I forced their pace. They
shifted their dull ground,
And went
Sprawling about the
passages of thought.
We tugged each other’s
words until they tore.
They asked me my
philosophy: I brought
Bits of it forth and laid them
on the floor.
kicked the bits about,
Then put them in my
pocket one by one—
I sorry I had brought them
out,
They grateful for the fun.
And when these words had
thus been sent
Jerking about, like beetles
round a wall,
sleep we went.
There was no happiness at
all
In that short hopeless
argument
Through yawns and on the
way to bed
Among men waiting to be
dead.
—1916