A Landscape of Negatives

No smoke comes from the tall marine smoke-stacks

That rise in clumps among the low purple ash-heaps.

No ships rear among the distant fixed waves,

For there are no ships in sight. The elaborate exteriors

Of factories give no hint of internal concentration.

The sky of one even tone at the present indefinite

Hour of day deepens at the black sky-tops of the smoke-

stacks,

A train rattles into a tunnel, and is gone.

Where there is no interplay of movement, no melody,

No rhyme, where the blank texture of surface

Is not relieved by the play of recurring action-

There the eye stares helplessly, with distended lids.

Where there is no smoke, there burn the slow hot fires.