Week-Night Service

The five old bells     Are hurrying and eagerly calling,     Imploring, protesting     They know, but clamorously falling     Into gabbling incoherence, never resting,     Like spattering showers from a bursten sky-rocket dropping     In splashes of sound, endlessly, never stopping.     The silver moon     That somebody has spun so high     To settle the question, yes or no, has caught     In the net of the night's balloon,     And sits with a smooth bland smile up there in the sky     Smiling at naught,     Unless the winking star that keeps her company     Makes little jests at the bells' insanity,     As if he knew aught!     The patient Night     Sits indifferent, hugged in her rags,     She neither knows nor cares     Why the old church sobs and brags;     The light distresses her eyes, and tears     Her old blue cloak, as she crouches and covers her face,     Smiling, perhaps, if we knew it, at the bells' loud clattering disgrace.     The wise old trees     Drop their leaves with a faint, sharp hiss of contempt,     While a car at the end of the street goes by with a laugh;     As by degrees     The poor bells cease, and the Night is exempt,     And the stars can chaff     The ironic moon at their ease, while the dim old church     Is peopled with shadows and sounds and ghosts that lurch     In its cenotaph.