Winter Nightfall

    The old yellow stucco
    Of the time of the Regent
    Is flaking and peeling:
    The rows of square windows
    In the straight yellow building
    Are empty and still;
    And the dusty dark evergreens
    Guarding the wicket
    Are draped with wet cobwebs,
    And above this poor wilderness
    Toneless and sombre
    Is the flat of the hill.

    They said that a colonel
    Who long ago died here
    Was the last one to live here:
    An old retired colonel,
    Some Fraser or Murray,
    I don't know his name;
    Death came here and summoned him,
    And the shells of him vanished
    Beyond all speculation;
    And silence resumed here,
    Silence and emptiness,
    And nobody came.

    Was it wet when he lived here,
    Were the skies dun and hurrying,
    Was the rain so irresolute?
    Did he watch the night coming,
    Did he shiver at nightfall
    Before he was dead?
    Did the wind go so creepily,
    Chilly and puffing,
    With drops of cold rain in it?
    Was the hill's lifted shoulder
    So lowering and menacing,
    So dark and so dread?

    Did he turn through his doorway
    And go to his study,
    And light many candles?
    And fold in the shutters,
    And heap up the fireplace
    To fight off the damps?
    And muse on his boyhood,
    And wonder if India
    Ever was real?
    And shut out the loneliness
    With pig-sticking memoirs
    And collections of stamps?

    Perhaps.    But he's gone now,
    He and his furniture
    Dispersed now for ever;
    And the last of his trophies,
    Antlers and photographs,
    Heaven knows where.
    And there's grass in his gateway,
    Grass on his footpath,
    Grass on his door-step;
    The garden's grown over,
    The well-chain is broken,
    The windows are bare.

    And I leave him behind me,
    For the straggling, discoloured
    Rags of the daylight,
    And hills and stone walls
    And a rick long forgotten
    Of blackening hay:
    The road pale and sticky,
    And cart-ruts and nail marks,
    And wind-ruffled puddles,
    And the slop of my footsteps
    In this desolate country's
    Cadaverous clay.