Robot (A Nineteenth Century Fable):

i

All is fresh, all is young
No pities remain to haunt our childish dreams.
The season at last has fallen.
A shallow brook, the mirror of last nights sorrow.
But look the ice is cracking.

All young once are now grown as birds fly south.
Winters first sorrow blooms as a rose ,
A tear of blood alights upon the breast of the snnow.

O mournful Kitty with your stein of tears
Poor little Kitty your master has left you.
Some other sweetheart may pick you, use you,
Yet none shall love you as once i did.
Tis a pity a love so fickle should ever exist;
For fickle is the flesh, so crude and frail.
Now all that is gone, what was is so
And all that once was good and pure
must go.

With shovel at my breast, or gas jet and mantle
In this wrought iron hand.
Our love you must think of as a ghost
That has found rest with thee, aye only with thee,
For that is the true place of my soul
The heaven of thy heart within.
I leave you my angel, my dove,
Your unworldy purity obliterates me.
I must no more be here
Than the living may dwell among the dead,
In this place of innocence.
For the Kingdom, tis none but she entices me,
Nought but to her opiate kisses do i return.

ii

If there is love in the Kingdom
My country, the Kingdom,
Down in the shade of the Liberty,
Where goose and gosling
Gather their trinkets of brass,
As in the reign of Winchester
And the Tabard;
So in the link of hands from Clink
to Bankside
And over the river of ice to Westminster.
I would guide you through the weal of Pepys
And Pudding Lane and beyond the shore of heaven.
But you are not here, not of this place
Of London's famished glare.

As much a ghost as i,
Belonging to the Kingdom only.
I shall find her there and dream
she is of thee.
And in her kisses will i reenshrine
The memory of all i can no more know.
Our innocence whichbloomed in spring,
To be born in an our of such beauty,
I have no words, to die.

And so nothing, less than nothing,
For with my gong the memory too is slain.
I did love you then, but i had not the right.
For you were born of the morn
And i of the night.
And that is how you must think of it;
That once, within all eternity, we had a moment
So brief that will outlive the death of stars.

iii

Like a thief i steal from your world
And back to ine of towers and locks,
And clocks. Like a well defined machine
Whose creator is dead or has abandoned him.
To the city square i return.
I declare myself a son
And i return to the shadow
Of this nebulous quadrant
Of my masters sinful den;
For whom i like a dog,
Like an ox of burden
To sweat and bleed
To keep this terrible beauty
The machine on rails.

iv

To you i bequeath my most precious possession.
In this place i have no need of heart.
Take it as a rose planted in the earth,
By spring it shall have blossomed
And your cheeks, my only love,
Will be in bloom and by such time
The man you knew shall be dead.

Keep this last memory
How once two lovers sang,
It was not so.
But a miracle which deceived
Two childish hearts;
A nightingale
Which fell across my path
In midwinter.
Transfixed by a love
Which could not last.
I placed her in a brook
With other gem stones of the past;
And though my heart may tremble
In your breast, there is no feeling,
No hankering for the past;
Once i offered you my life
But it was not mine to give.

These wax fingers are not flesh,
These painful hands are not mine.
The earth i dig createth me,
This blessed verdant land
To which i wish i could return.
I've had my quart of white skin
And white stone, poisoned apples
And thorned hearts.
And please put down this childish song;
Put away thye dreadful memory.
Bury all where once a shallow brook did pool
'Neath a nightingales perch,
Where sable fish did swim
And my love did sit and bathe her gentle feet.

(Written when the poet was 16)