Explore "Presences" by Hervey Allen on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Despise the garish presences that flaunt / The obvious possession of today, / To wear with me the spectacles that haunt / The optic sense with wraiths of yesterday -- / These cobbled shores through which the traffic streams / Have been the stage-set of successive towns, / Where coffined actors postured out their dreams, / And harlot Folly changed her thousand gowns.
This corner-shop was Bull's Head Tavern, / When names now dead on marble lived in clay; / Its rooms were like a sanded cavern, / Where candles made a sallow jest of day, / And drovers' boots came grinding like a quern, / While merchants drank their steaming cups of "tay."