Explore "Eclipse" by Hervey Allen on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Once melodies of street-cries washed these walls, / Glad as the refluent song / Of cheerful waters from a happy spring / That shout their way along; / Such cries were born in other days from lips / A spirit taught to sing. Now it is gone!
Memory expects those hymns for shrimp and prawn, / Or the mellifluous chaunt from the black gorge / Of Orpheus inside a murky skin, / Who looked the gold sun in the eye / While garden mists grew thin, / And intoned "_Hoppin' John_!"
As when the shadow of the gray eclipse / Haggards the countryside, / When moon-fooled birds have nothing more to say, / And soft untimely bats begin to slide; / As darkness sweeps the morning light away, / So silence brushes music now from lips.
Oh! Can it be the songless spirit of this age / Has slain the ancient music, or that ears / Have harsher thresholds? Only this I know: / The streets grow more discordant with the years; / And that which bids the huckster sing no more, / Will drive the flower-woman from the door.