At The West India Docks
(A Memory of August, 1883)
I STOOD in the ghastly gleaming night by the swollen, sullen flow
Of the dreadful river that rolls her tides through the City of Wealth and
Woe;
And mine eyes were heavy with sleepless hours, and dry with desperate
grief,
And my brain was throbbing and aching, and mine anguish had no relief.
For never a moment — no; not one — through all the dreary day,
And thro' all the weary night forlorn, would the pitiless pulses stay
Of the thundering great Machinery that such insistence had,
As it crushed out human hearts and souls, that it slowly drove me mad.
And there, in the dank and foetid mist, as I, silent and tearless, stood,
And the river's exhalations, sweating forth their muddy blood,
Breathed full on my face and poisoned me, like the slow, putrescent
drain
That carries away from the shambles the refuse of flesh and brain —
There rose up slowly before me, in the dome of the city's light,
A vast and shadowy Substance, with shafts and wheels of might,
Tremendous, ruthless, fatal; and I knew the visible shape
Of that thundering great Machinery from which there was no escape.
It stood there high in the heavens, fronting the face of God,
And the spray it sprinkled had blasted the green and flowery sod
All round where, through stony precincts, its Cyclopean pillars fell
To its adamantine foundations that were fixed in the womb of hell.
And the birds that, wild and whirling, and moth-like, flew to its glare
Were struck by the flying wheel-spokes, and maimed and murdered
there;
And the dust that swept about its black panoply overhead,
And the din of it seemed to shatter and scatter the sheeted dead.
But mine eyes were fixed on the people that sought this horrible den,
And they mounted in thronged battalions, children and women and men,
Right out from the low horizon, more far than eye could see,
From the north and the south and the east and the west, they came
perpetually —
Some silent, some raving, some sobbing, some laughing, some cursing,
some crying,
Some alone, some with others, some struggling, some dragging the dead
and the dying,
Up to the central Wheel enormous with its wild devouring breath
That winnowed the livid smoke-clouds and the sickening fume of death.
Then suddenly, as I watched it all, a keen wind blew amain,
And the air grew clearer and purer, and I could see it plain —
How under the central Wheel a black stone Altar stood,
And a great, gold Idol upon it was gleaming like fiery blood.
And there, in front of the Altar, was a huge, round lurid Pit,
And the thronged battalions were marching to the yawning mouth of it
In the clangour of the Machinery and the Wheel's devouring breath
That winnowed the livid smoke-clouds and the sickening fume of death.
And once again, as I gazed there, and the keen wind still blew on,
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poem by Francis William Lauderdale Adams
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