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• Ah yes, exactly so: but when a man
• Has trundled out of England into France
• And half thro Belgium, always in this prance
• Of steam, and still has stuck to his first plan—
• Blank verse or sonnets; and as he began
• Would end:—why, even the blankest verse may chance
• To falter in default of circumstance,
• And even the sonnet lack its mystic span.
• Trees will be trees, grass grass, pools merely pools,
• 10 Unto the end of time and Belgium. Points
• Of fact which Poets (very abject fools)
• Get scent of—once their epithets grown tame
• And scarce. Even to these foreign rails—my joints
• Begin to find their jolting much the same.

   

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• At Antwerp, there is a low wall
• About the city, and a moat
• Beneath, that the wind keeps afloat.
• You pass the gates in a slow crawl,
• And if the air is warm at all
• The Carillon will give you thought.

• I climbed the stair in Antwerp Church,
• What time the urgent weight of sound
• At sunset spins the building round:
• Far up, the Carillon did search
• The wind; and the birds came to perch
• Far under, where the gables wound.

• In Antwerp harbour on the Scheldt
• I stood along, a certain space
• Of night. The mist was near my face;
• 10 The Deep on, the flow was heard & felt:
• The Carillon kept pause, and dwelt
• In music thro the silent place.

• At Bruges, when you leave the train,—
• A singing numbness in your ears,—
• The Carillon's first sound appears
• Only the inner hum. Again
• A little minute though—your brain
• Takes quiet, and the whole sense hears.

• John Memmelinck and John van Eyck
• Hold state at Bruges. In sore shame
• I scanned the works that keep their name.
• The Carillon, which then did strike
• Mine ears, was heard of theirs alike:
• It set me closer unto them.

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