The Seven Old Men

O swarming city, city full of dreams,     Where in a full day the spectre walks and speaks;     Mighty colossus, in your narrow veins     My story flows as flows the rising sap.     One morn, disputing with my tired soul,     And like a hero stiffening all my nerves,     I trod a suburb shaken by the jar     Of rolling wheels, where the fog magnified     The houses either side of that sad street,     So they seemed like two wharves the ebbing flood     Leaves desolate by the river-side. A mist,     Unclean and yellow, inundated space     A scene that would have pleased an actor's soul.     Then suddenly an aged man, whose rags     Were yellow as the rainy sky, whose looks     Should have brought alms in floods upon his head,     Without the misery gleaming in his eye,     Appeared before me; and his pupils seemed     To have been washed with gall; the bitter frost     Sharpened his glance; and from his chin a beard     Sword-stiff and ragged, Judas-like stuck forth.     He was not bent but broken: his backbone     Made a so true right angle with his legs,     That, as he walked, the tapping stick which gave     The finish to the picture, made him seem     Like some infirm and stumbling quadruped     Or a three-legged Jew. Through snow and mud     He walked with troubled and uncertain gait,     As though his sabots trod upon the dead,     Indifferent and hostile to the world.     His double followed him: tatters and stick     And back and eye and beard, all were the same;     Out of the same Hell, indistinguishable,     These centenarian twins, these spectres odd,     Trod the same pace toward some end unknown.     To what fell complot was I then exposed?     Humiliated by what evil chance?     For as the minutes one by one went by     Seven times I saw this sinister old man     Repeat his image there before my eyes!     Let him who smiles at my inquietude,     Who never trembled at a fear like mine,     Know that in their decrepitude's despite     These seven old hideous monsters had the mien     Of beings immortal.     Then, I thought, must I,     Undying, contemplate the awful eighth;     Inexorable, fatal, and ironic double;     Disgusting Phoenix, father of himself     And his own son? In terror then I turned     My back upon the infernal band, and fled     To my own place, and closed my door; distraught     And like a drunkard who sees all things twice,     With feverish troubled spirit, chilly and sick,     Wounded by mystery and absurdity!     In vain my reason tried to cross the bar,     The whirling storm but drove her back again;     And my soul tossed, and tossed, an outworn wreck,     Mastless, upon a monstrous, shoreless sea.