A Roadside Harp: A Book of Verses

Chapter 44: Fog

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About This Book

This collection gathers lyrical and narrative poems that range from ballads and sonnets to short meditations. The verses move between rural and urban settings, evoking English and Irish countryside, Italian art and London streets, and blend historical, religious, and classical allusion with close natural observation. Recurring concerns include time and memory, faith and loss, friendship and artistic response; many pieces treat ruined churches, portraiture, and small domestic scenes with musical language and formal polish. Alternating narrative storytelling and reflective shorter lyrics, the work balances nostalgic melancholy with bright sensory detail and a cultivated, songlike cadence.

Fog

LIKE bodiless water passing in a sigh,
Thro’ palsied streets the fatal shadows flow,
And in their sharp disastrous undertow
Suck in the morning sun, and all the sky.
The towery vista sinks upon the eye,
As if it heard the Hebrew bugles blow,
Black and dissolved; nor could the founders know
How what was built so bright should daily die.

Thy mood with man ’s is broken and blent in,

City of Stains! and ache of thought doth drown

The primitive light in which thy life began;

Great as thy dole is, smirchèd with his sin,

Greater and elder yet the love of man

Full in thy look, tho’ the dark visor ’s down.