Synthesis

I saw the world—
the wind-stirred ridges,
mountains pillowed by upstraining clouds,
the wrinkled flash of leaf-trellised water,
or frost-powdered crispness of winter sunrise—
myself the centre,
the world a dream

* * *

And then the war ....
Iron could break the crystal of my life
like the glass of others.
Ice-ribbed despair.
The world three-dimensionally stark
like a charred forest.
—Myself the dream.
Sense blunt,
pleasure not absent,
but amorphous, numb,
existence a steel blue ache

* * *

Rain soaking the mud-fragrant grass,
close, warm-drumming on the sou'wester,
a black flock of smoke from a factory funnel,
a railway-line,
steel bond with toiling man
And I a part of this self-changing scheme,
focussing its conflicts,
identified
with its chief conflict of the new against the old.
Individual fickleness and doubt
has become statistical certainty.

October