Slushy is the highway between the unspeakable hedges;
I pause
Irresolute under a telegraph-pole,
The fourteenth telegraph-pole on the way
From Shere to Havering,
The twenty-first
From Havering to Shere.

Crimson is the western sky; upright it stands,
The solitary pole,
Sombre and terrible,
Splitting the dying sun
Into two semi-circular halves.
I do not think I have seen, not even in Vorticist pictures,
Anything so solitary,
So absolutely nude;
Yet this was an item once in the uninteresting forest,
With branches sticking out of it, and crude green leaves
And resinous sap,
And underneath it a litter of pine spindles
And ants;
Birds fretted in the boughs and bees were busy in it,
Squirrels ran noisily up it;
Now it is naked and dead,
Delightfully naked
And beautifully dead.

Delightfully and beautifully, for across it melodiously,
Stirred by the evening wind,
The wires where electric messages are continually being despatched