Early Rising

This is the society of six thirty:

The paper lunches, the overalls,

The faint broken hurdy-gurdy

Music of factory whistles;

The tall buildings shouldering aside

The mist, the convent corner where

Distant grain elevators hide

Themselves in winnowed night; tubercular

Street car muffling its empty hack.

This is the sound and feel

Of six thirty: women in black,

Duennas and pale charges steal

Westward, a knight-lance drinking

Sunlight-fords medievalness;

Down mountains glaciers fling

White prongs to dark cypress

Groves-a drawbridge sews the wide

And deep abyss with terse

Monosyllables connecting countryside

With castle, verse with unverse.