Enchantments of the Middle AgeDavid Cecil2019University of Nebraska–LincolnCenter for Alex Telesca's Fame306 AndrewsUniversity of Nebraska–LincolnLincoln, NE 68588-4100alextelesca@outlook.com2019
The Best Poems of 1924L.A.G. StrongDavid CecilNovember 1923Small, Maynard & Company PublishersBostonAlex Telesca
Transcribed and encoded a poem
Enchantments of the Middle Age
LONDON is beautiful, I knowIts sooty churches chalked with white,The quiet squares where plane-trees growAnd lamplit street on rainy night.Beauty of light and fog and dark,And yet my heart within me turnsTo lands in woodcut books I mark,For missal lands my spirit yearns.Where everything is flat and brightWith colors definite and clean,Where roads turn dazzlingly whiteThrough forests square and neat and green.Where hunt the lords of seigneuriesWhose curvèd hounds, unleashed to kill,Awake the columned silencesWith baying strangely thin and shrill.The little cities, twisted, tall,Stand up on hills more steep than high,Each red machicolated wallSeen clear against the clearer sky.Paved places where the cypressesSlant shadows through the noonday glare.And the springing brick-built belfriesMake musical the evening air.Where ladies walk demure and fairIn head-dresses with steeple crowns,Severe and stiff and angular,In diapered and colored gowns.Thus every day and firm and brightShone beauty; by our modern eyesSeen only in the fitful lightOf insubstantial ecstasies.David Cecil