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From a London garden cover

From a London garden

Chapter 14: CHARLES LAMB AT ENFIELD
By Arthur St. John Adcock
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About This Book

A collected series of lyrical poems moves between urban and rural imagery to reflect on love, mortality, time, memory, and moral growth. The poet uses concise, imagistic language and varied meters to meditate on human experience: longing and loss, pride and humility, the rhythms of city life and quiet country scenes, the passage of days and seasons, death and consolation. Voices range from personal confession to philosophical observation, with elegiac tones, religious reflection, and celebration of steadfastness. Recurring motifs—light and shadow, dawn and evening, gardens and streets—bind individual pieces into a contemplative portrait of inner life amid modern surroundings.

CHARLES LAMB AT ENFIELD

(“Yet in this self-condemned obliviousness, in the stagnation, some molesting yearnings of life, not quite killed, rise prompting me that there was a London, and that I was of that old Jerusalem. In dreams I am in Fleet Market, but I wake, and cry to sleep again.”—Lamb to Wordsworth, 1830.)

Though yet no blossom stars the hedge, nor light
Of daisies twinkles from the barren lawn,
Here is no death, for, like the sun by night,
Spring waits below the earth her hour of dawn.
But cold to this mute life that never dies,
This dull, indifferent Nature old and dread,
Under these leafless boughs and alien skies
I wander ghost-like from a life that’s dead:
That’s dead to me, self-banished from the ways
Whose walls hold all of heaven I have known,
Whose phantoms haunt me through my nights and days
With unforgotten touch, and look, and tone.
I tread no more the city that I love,
And though its far-off streets be peopled yet
And roofed with their grey slips of sky above,
For me they only live in my regret—
Those roaring streets that glared in sunny noons,
And gloomed in lamp-lit eves of plashy rain,
Or slept enchanted under dreamful moons—
Their life goes on without me; and in vain
I strive elsewhere to gather aught of good,
To quite forget them dwelling here apart,
I cannot make them strangers if I would,
Nor close my ears against them, nor my heart:
Old echoes from the very stones I trod
Call to me with a human voice, and then
I sadden in these lonely fields of God,
Grown home-sick for the crowded world of men.