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Book: In Hospital

  • Enter Patient
    The morning mists still haunt the stony street;
    The northern summer air is shrill and cold;
    13 lines
  • Waiting
    A square, squat room (a cellar on promotion),
    Drab to the soul, drab to the very daylight;
    13 lines
  • Interior
    The gaunt brown walls
    Look infinite in their decent meanness.
    19 lines
  • Scrubber
    She's tall and gaunt, and in her hard, sad face
    With flashes of the old fun's animation
    13 lines
  • Before
    Behold me waiting—waiting for the knife.
    A little while, and at a leap I storm
    14 lines
  • Nocturn
    At the barren heart of midnight,
    When the shadow shuts and opens
    18 lines
  • Operation
    You are carried in a basket,
    Like a carcase from the shambles,
    28 lines
  • Music
    Down the quiet eve,
    Thro' my window with the sunset
    33 lines
  • After
    Like as a flamelet blanketed in smoke,
    So through the anaesthetic shows my life;
    13 lines
  • Interlude
    O, the fun, the fun and frolic
    That The Wind that Shakes the Barley
    28 lines
  • Vigil
    Lived on one's back,
    In the long hours of repose,
    45 lines
  • Romance
    'Talk of pluck!' pursued the Sailor,
    Set at euchre on his elbow,
    23 lines
  • Staff Nurse:Old Style
    The greater masters of the commonplace,
    REMBRANDT and good SIR WALTER—only these
    14 lines, 1 comment
  • Apparition
    Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably,
    Neat-footed and weak-fingered:  in his face -
    14 lines
  • Lady Probationer
    Some three, or five, or seven, and thirty years;
    A Roman nose; a dimpling double-chin;
    14 lines
  • House-Surgeon
    Exceeding tall, but built so well his height
    Half-disappears in flow of chest and limb;
    13 lines
  • Staff Nurse: New Style
    Blue-eyed and bright of face but waning fast
    Into the sere of virginal decay,
    13 lines
  • Children: Private Ward
    Here in this dim, dull, double-bedded room,
    I play the father to a brace of boys,
    14 lines
  • Clinical
    Hist? . . .
    Through the corridor's echoes,
    49 lines
  • Visitor
    Her little face is like a walnut shell
    With wrinkling lines; her soft, white hair adorns
    13 lines
  • Etching
    Two and thirty is the ploughman.
    He's a man of gallant inches,
    25 lines
  • Pastoral
    It's the Spring.
    Earth has conceived, and her bosom,
    37 lines
  • Casualty
    As with varnish red and glistening
    Dripped his hair; his feet looked rigid;
    23 lines
  • Suicide
    Staring corpselike at the ceiling,
    See his harsh, unrazored features,
    23 lines
  • Ave, Caesar!
    From the winter's grey despair,
    From the summer's golden languor,
    19 lines
  • Anterotics
    Laughs the happy April morn
    Thro' my grimy, little window,
    13 lines
  • The Chief
    His brow spreads large and placid, and his eye
    Is deep and bright, with steady looks that still.
    13 lines, 1 comment
  • Discharged
    Carry me out
    Into the wind and the sunshine,
    29 lines

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