(_For Alan Porter_)
Tick-tock! the moon, that pale round clock
Her big face peering, goes tick-tock!
Metallic as a grasshopper
The faint far tickings start and stir.
All night tinily you can hear
Tick-tock tinkling down the sheer
Steep falls of space. Minute, aloof,
Here is no praise, here no reproof.
Remote in voids star-purged of sense,
Tick-tock in stark indifference!
From ice-black lands of lack and rock,
The two swords shake and clank tick-tock.
In the dark din of the day's vault
Demand thy headlong soul shall halt
One moment. Hearken, taut and tense,
In the vast Silence beyond sense,
The moon! From the hushed heart of her,
Metallic as a grasshopper,
Patient though earth may writhe and rock,
Imperturbably, tock, tick-tock!
Till, boastful earth, your forests wilt
In grotesque Death. Till Death shall silt,
Loud-blooded man, her unchecked sands
From feet and warped expiring hands
Through fatuous channels of the thinned
Brain. Till all the clangours which have dinned
Through your arched ears are only this,
Tick-tock down blank eternities,
Where still the sallow death's-head ticks
As stars burn down like candle-wicks.