In A Railway Carriage

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Title:     In A Railway Carriage
Author: Alfred Noyes [More Titles by Noyes]

Three long isles of sunset-cloud,
Poised in an ocean of gold,
Floated away in the west
As the long train southward rolled;

And through the gleam and shade of the panes,
While meadow and wood went by,
Across the streaming earth
We watched the steadfast sky.

Dark before the westward window,
Heavy and bloated, rolled
The face of a drunken woman
Nodding against the gold;

Dark before the infinite glory,
With bleared and leering eyes,
It stupidly lurched and nodded
Against the tender skies.

_What had ye done to her, masters of men,
That her head be bowed down thus--
Thus for your golden vespers,
And deepening angelus?_

Dark, besotted, malignant, vacant,
Slobbering, wrinkled, old,
Weary and wickedly smiling,
She nodded against the gold.

Pitiful, loathsome, maudlin, lonely,
Her moist, inhuman eyes
Blinked at the flies on the window,
And could not see the skies.

As a beast that turns and returns to a mirror
And will not see its face,
Her eyes rejected the sunset,
Her soul lay dead in its place,

Dead in the furrows and folds of her flesh
As a corpse lies lapped in the shroud;
Silently floated beside her
The isles of sunset-cloud.

_What had ye done to her, years upon years,
That her head should be bowed down thus--
Thus for your golden vespers,
And deepening angelus?_

Her nails were blackened and split with labour,
Her back was heavily bowed;
Silently floated beside her
The isles of sunset-cloud.

Over their tapering streaks of lilac,
In breathless depths afar,
Bright as the tear of an angel
Glittered a lonely star.

While the hills and the streams of the world went past us,
And the long train roared and rolled
Southward, and dusk was falling,
She nodded against the gold.

[The end]
Alfred Noyes's poem: In A Railway Carriage

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