Robert Browning
Books and Quotes Collection
Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth / Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth, / Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood / Changes and off he goes!) within a rood— / Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth.
My first thought was, he lied in every word, /
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye /
Askance to watch the working of his lie
[...] And yet / Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, / And blew "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."
[…] Mad brewage set to work / Their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the Turk / Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews.
No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms; / This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath / For the fiend's glowing hoof - to see the wrath / Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes.
One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare, / Stood stupefied, however he came there: / Thrust out past service from the devil's stud!
Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood, / Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth / Desperate and done with; [...]
Alive? he might be dead for aught I know, / With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, / And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane;
Will the night send a howlet or a bat? / I asked: when something on the dismal flat / Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train.
Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him / Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim / Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.