Will sees the Dane

He skips Sunday service, since the preacher

Speaks his prayers like a scholar’s parrot.

Far from the leas and lanes and rushy streams

Of Arden, he rows his boat in moonlight,

Past floating barges, and ghostly walled houses

On the banks of the Thames, haunted by echoes

Of Essex and the foul stink of dung yards.

Wash-water slakes the slack mudbank hollows.

Counting with the river’s rhythm and pulse

Of brimming thuds of tide on bed-fast beams,

He moors his boat, catching the pirr-pawing

Breath of breeze. He tastes his lexis, new words.

Before him a wall - moss, some weeds, grass tufts -

Sheening with wild waves of watery light.

Above the wall, a smoky face swabs slops

Of spilt beer, sweeps wet leaves; his hoary head,

The haze-fire spectre of the misty gloom,

Peers, purgatorial, from the shadow

Of death’s vale; and shines his lighted lantern,

His hair quiffed like a bull’s tuft by the breeze.

Quick as a tinkerbell gives on hard stone,

Will sees a dead unhomed bodiless Dane

Outgloom the frantic night in Elsinore.

Clouds shadow, the river slogs, a cock crows.