We’d found an old Boche dug-out, and he knew,
And gave us hell, for shell on frantic shell
Hammered on top, but never quite burst through.
Rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime
Kept slush waist high, that rising hour by hour,
Choked up the steps too thick with clay to climb.
What murk of air remained stank old, and sour
With fumes of whizz-bangs, and the smell of men
Who’d lived there years, and left their curse in the den,
If not their corpses...
                        There we herded from the blast
Of whizz-bangs, but one found our door at last.
Buffeting eyes and breath, snuffing the candles.
And thud! flump! thud! down the steep steps came thumping
And splashing in the flood, deluging muck —
The sentry’s body; then his rifle, handles
Of old Boche bombs, and mud in ruck on ruck.
We dredged him up, for killed, until he whined
“O sir, my eyes — I’m blind — I’m blind, I’m blind!”
Coaxing, I held a flame against his lids
And said if he could see the least blurred light
He was not blind; in time he’d get all right.
“I can’t,” he sobbed. Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids
Watch my dreams still; but I forgot him there
In posting next for duty, and sending a scout
To beg a stretcher somewhere, and floundering about
To other posts under the shrieking air.

Those other wretches, how they bled and spewed,
And one who would have drowned himself for good, —
I try not to remember these things now.
Let dread hark back for one word only: how
Half-listening to that sentry’s moans and jumps,
And the wild chattering of his broken teeth,
Renewed most horribly whenever crumps
Pummelled the roof and slogged the air beneath —
Through the dense din, I say, we heard him shout
“I see your lights!” But ours had long died out.

The last silk-floating thought has gone from the dandelion stem,
And the flesh of the stalk holds up for nothing a blank diadem.

So night's flood-winds have lifted my last desire from me,
And my hollow flesh stands up in the night like vanity.

As I stand on this hill, with the whitening cave of the city in front
And this Helen beside me, I am blank; being nothing, I bear the brunt

Of the nightly heavens overhead, like an immense, open eye,
Like a cat's distended pupil, that sparkles with little stars
As with thoughts that flash and crackle in far-off malignancy,
So distant, they cannot touch me, whom now nothing mars.

In front of me, yes, up the darkness, goes the gush of the lights of two towns,
As the breath which rushes upwards from the nostrils of an immense
Beast crouched across the globe, ready, if need be, to pounce
Across the space on the cat in heaven's hostile eminence.

All round me, above and below, the night's twin consciousness roars
With sounds that endlessly swell and sink like the storm of thought in the brain,
Lifting and falling, long gasps through the sluices, like silence that pours
Through invisible pulses, slowly, filling the night's dark vein.

The night is immense and awful, yet to me it is nothing at all.
Or rather 'tis I am nothing, here in the fur of the heather
Like an empty dandelion stalk, bereft of connection, small
And nakedly nothing 'twixt world and heaven, two creatures hostile together.

I in the fur of the world, alone; but this Helen close by!
How we hate one another to-night, hate, she and I
To numbness and nothingness; I dead, she refusing to die.
The female whose venom can more than kill, can numb and then nullify.