January in Delhi

THIS is no Indian day, with thick white mist
silently clinging, cold and wet with half-rain:

how they complain

those shrill green birds hid in the trees!

Without the hard bright sun, how strange now look
the mosques with their bulbous domes

and the fretted tomb

hunched and resentful of the alien gloom,

conspiring to resist

this English winter envelope of cloud.

This is good Gothic weather: on these days
the village churches stand under dripping elms

in flat-washed greys.

Inside, there’s smell of lamp-oil, ancient wood,
damp stone and worn-out hassocks: underfoot
the brasses, loose in their stone settings

make a dull clank

beneath the coco-nut matting. Outside, rank
grave-grass caresses the skeleton with its root.

This is the cold grey time for old grey things:
the menhir on the moor, or the stone chambered grave,

a haunted cave

on the bleak Cotswold hill-top, where the Severn
gleams faintly silver away below in the woods.

No sound, save

the regular ooze and drip of water
snail-tracking down the lichened walls,
splashing upon the floor of wet red clay.

This is weather for wood-fires: down in the pub
the little bar is full of flickering heat,

with mud-caked feet

and cheerful blue of faded dungarees
the ploughboy sips his beer, warmed on the hob.

Books and quiet talk

for me at home after the late afternoon’s walk.
So was it once, now lie the years between.

When sounds retreat

from madness back to sanity and love,
for how long must I walk the stricken grove!

13 January 1943

NOTES

• Previously published in Christmas Miscellany [unknown publication, probably wartime Armed Forces, India. Eds], acknowledged by Currey and Gibson Poems from India (1946), xix, 60-61