Down the stone stairs
Girls with their large eyes wide with tragedy
Lift looks of shocked and momentous emotion up at me.
And I smile.
Ladies
Stepping like birds with their bright and pointed feet
Peer anxiously forth, as if for a boat to carry them out of the wreckage,
And among the wreck of the theatre crowd
I stand and smile.
They take tragedy so becomingly.
Which pleases me.
But when I meet the weary eyes
The reddened aching eyes of the bar-man with thin arms,
I am glad to go back to where I came from.
After The Opera
David Herbert Richards Lawrence
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