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Poem	I came an errand one cloud-blowing evening To a slab-built, black-paper-covered house Of one room and one window and one door, The only dwelling in a waste cut over A hundred square miles round it in the mountains: And that not dwelt in now by men or women. (It never had been dwelt in, though, by women, So what is this I make a sorrow of?) I came as census-taker to the waste To count the people in it and found none, None in the hundred miles, none in the house, Where I came last with some hope, but not much, After hours' overlooking from the cliffs An emptiness flayed to the very stone. I found no people that dared show themselves, None not in hiding from the outward eye. The time was autumn, but how anyone could tell the time of year when every tree That could have dropped a leaf was down itself And nothing but the stump of it was left Now bringing out its rings in sugar of pitch; And every tree up stood a rotting trunk Without a single leaf to spend on autumn, Or branch to whistle after what was spent. Perhaps the wind the more without the help Of breathing trees said something of the time Of year or day the way it swung a door Forever off the latch, as if rude men Passed in and slammed it shut each one behind him For the next one to open for himself. I counted nine I had no right to count (But this was dreamy unofficial counting) Before I made the tenth across the threshold. Where was my supper? Where was anyone's? No lamp was lit. Nothing was on the table. The stove was cold—the stove was off the chimney— And down by one side where it lacked a leg. The people that had loudly passed the door Were people to the ear but not the eye. They were not on the table with their elbows. They were not sleeping in the shelves of bunks. I saw no men there and no bones of men there. I armed myself against such bones as might be With the pitch-blackened stub of an ax-handle I picked up off the straw-dust-covered floor. Not bones, but the ill-fitted window rattled. The door was still because I held it shut While I thought what to do that could be done— About the house—about the people not there. This house in one year fallen to decay Filled me with no less sorrow than the houses Fallen to ruin in ten thousand years Where Asia wedges Africa from Europe. Nothing was left to do that I could see Unless to find that there was no one there And declare to the cliffs too far for echo, "The place is desert, and let whoso lurks In silence, if in this he is aggrieved, Break silence now or be forever silent. Let him say why it should not be declared so." The melancholy of having to count souls Where they grow fewer and fewer every year Is extreme where they shrink to none at all. It must be I want life to go on living.
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