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Home  »  New Poems  »  26. Embankment at Night, before the War

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930). New Poems. 1916.

26. Embankment at Night, before the War

Outcasts.

THE NIGHT rain, dripping unseen,

Comes endlessly kissing my face and my hands.

The river, slipping between

Lamps, is rayed with golden bands

Half way down its heaving sides;

Revealed where it hides.

Under the bridge

Great electric cars

Sing through, and each with a floor-light racing along at its side.

Far off, oh, midge after midge

Drifts over the gulf that bars

The night with silence, crossing the lamp-touched tide.

At Charing Cross, here, beneath the bridge

Sleep in a row the outcasts,

Packed in a line with their heads against the wall.

Their feet, in a broken ridge

Stretch out on the way, and a lout casts

A look as he stands on the edge of this naked stall.

Beasts that sleep will cover

Their faces in their flank; so these

Have huddled rags or limbs on the naked sleep.

Save, as the tram-cars hover

Past with the noise of a breeze

And gleam as of sunshine crossing the low black heap,

Two naked faces are seen

Bare and asleep,

Two pale clots swept and swept by the light of the cars.

Foam-clots showing between

The long, low tidal-heap,

The mud-weed opening two pale, shadowless stars.

Over the pallor of only two faces

Passes the gallivant beam of the trams;

Shows in only two sad places

The white bare bone of our shams.

A little, bearded man, pale, peaked in sleeping,

With a face like a chickweed flower.

And a heavy woman, sleeping still keeping

Callous and dour.

Over the pallor of only two places

Tossed on the low, black, ruffled heap

Passes the light of the tram as it races

Out of the deep.

Eloquent limbs

In disarray

Sleep-suave limbs of a youth with long, smooth thighs

Hutched up for warmth; the muddy rims

Of trousers fray

On the thin bare shins of a man who uneasily lies.

The balls of five red toes

As red and dirty, bare

Young birds forsaken and left in a nest of mud—

Newspaper sheets enclose

Some limbs like parcels, and tear

When the sleeper stirs or turns on the ebb of the flood—

One heaped mound

Of a woman’s knees

As she thrusts them upward under the ruffled skirt—

And a curious dearth of sound

In the presence of these

Wastrels that sleep on the flagstones without any hurt.

Over two shadowless, shameless faces

Stark on the heap

Travels the light as it tilts in its paces

Gone in one leap.

At the feet of the sleepers, watching,

Stand those that wait

For a place to lie down; and still as they stand, they sleep,

Wearily catching

The flood’s slow gait

Like men who are drowned, but float erect in the deep.

Oh, the singing mansions,

Golden-lighted tall

Trams that pass, blown ruddily down the night!

The bridge on its stanchions

Stoops like a pall

To this human blight.

On the outer pavement, slowly,

Theatre people pass,

Holding aloft their umbrellas that flash and are bright

Like flowers of infernal moly

Over nocturnal grass

Wetly bobbing and drifting away on our sight.

And still by the rotten

Row of shattered feet,

Outcasts keep guard.

Forgotten,

Forgetting, till fate shall delete

One from the ward.

The factories on the Surrey side

Are beautifully laid in black on a gold-grey sky.

The river’s invisible tide

Threads and thrills like ore that is wealth to the eye.

And great gold midges

Cross the chasm

At the bridges

Above intertwined plasm.