"There is a ladder leaning against the window-sill, / And a mutter of thunder in the air."

One from the -Sp- of MacSpaunday, rounding out the quartet:


The Pylons, Stephen Spender

The secret of these hills was stone, and cottages
Of that stone made,
And crumbling roads
That turned on sudden hidden villages

Now over these small hills, they have built the concrete
That trails black wire
Pylons, those pillars
Bare like nude giant girls that have no secret.

The valley with its gilt and evening look
And the green chestnut
Of customary root,
Are mocked dry like the parched bed of a brook.

But far above and far as sight endures
Like whips of anger
With lightning's danger
There runs the quick perspective of the future.

This dwarfs our emerald country by its trek
So tall with prophecy
Dreaming of cities
Where often clouds shall lean their swan-white neck.


(In case it's unclear, these are high-tension power lines he's praising.) This was the poem that got Spender noticed as a Hot New Voice^TM of the 1930s -- to the point that it gave the name to the so-called Pylon Poets, a group of writers who turned away from T.S. Eliot's style of abstracted modernism for one that's more politically engaged. Spender's early work was heavily influenced by Auden, but he eventually found a manner more congenial to his more introspective personality.

---L.

Subject quote from "Dog-Days," Amy Lowell.