“Down the long and silent street, The dawn, with silver-sandaled feet,Crept like a frightened girl.”

“We caught the tread of dancing feet,We loitered down the moonlit street,And stopped beneath the harlot's house.Inside, above the din and fray,We heard the loud musicians playThe 'Treues Liebes Herz' of Strauss.Like strange mechanical grotesques,Making fantastic arabesques,The shadows raced across the blind.We watched the ghostly dancers spinTo sound of horn and violin,Like black leaves wheeling in the wind.Like wire-pulled automatons,Slim silhouetted skeletonsWent sidling through the slow quadrille,Then took each other by the hand,And danced a stately saraband;Their laughter echoed thin and shrill. Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressedA phantom lover to her breast,Sometimes they seemed to try to sing.Sometimes a horrible marionetteCame out, and smoked its cigaretteUpon the steps like a live thing.Then, turning to my love, I said,'The dead are dancing with the dead,The dust is whirling with the dust.'But she--she heard the violin,And left my side, and entered in:Love passed into the house of lust.Then suddenly the tune went false,The dancers wearied of the waltz,The shadows ceased to wheel and whirl.And down the long and silent street,The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet,Crept like a frightened girl.”

“The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.”

“There was a silence. The evening darkened in the room. Noiselessly and with silver feet the shadows crept in from the garden. The colours faded wearily out of things.”

“In the glittering light I got drunk and reeled through the rooms, And cried, “Cartagena! swamp of unholy loves!” And wept for the Indian whores who were younger than me, and I was eighteen, And splashed after the crew down the streets wearing sandals bought at a stall And got back to the ship, dawn came, we were far out at sea.”

“No, the last thing she cared about was whether people were staring at the boy and girl kissing by the river, as London, it's cities and towers and churches and bridges and streets, circled all about them like the memory of a dream. And if the Thames that ran beside them, sure and silver in the afternoon light, recalled a night long ago when the moon shone as brightly as a shilling on this same boy and girl, or if the stones of Blackfriars knew the tread of their feet and thought to themselves: At last, the wheel comes to a full circle, they kept their silence.”