Bums on park-benches spit and look up at the sky.

Garment-workers in their overcoats pile back into black gaps of doors.

Where the wind comes from scarlet windflowers sway on rippling verges of pools, sound of girls dancing thud of vermillion feet.

Madison Square

V

 The stars bend down through the dingy platitude of arc-lights as if they were groping for something among the houses, as if they would touch the gritty pavement covered with dust and scraps of paper and piles of horse-dung of the wide deserted square.

They are all about me; they sear my body. How very cold the stars are touching my body. What do they seek the fierce ice-flames of the stars in the platitude of arc-lights?

 Plaza Mayor, Madrid

VI

Not willingly have I wronged you O Eros, it is the bitter blood of joyless generations making my fingers loosen suddenly about the full glass of purple wine for which my dry lips ache, making me turn aside from the wide arms of lovers that would have slaked the rage of my body for supple arms and burning young flushed faces to wander in solitary streets.

A funeral clatters over the glimmering cobbles; they are burying despair! Lank horses whose raw bones show through the embroidered black caparisons and whose heads jerk feebly under the tall nodding crests; they are burying despair. A great hearse that trundles crazily along under pompous swaying plumes and intricate designs of mud-splashed heraldry; they are burying despair! A coffin obliterated under the huge folds of a faded velvet pall and following clattering over the cobblestones lurching through mud-puddles a long train of cabs rain-soaked barouches old landaus off which the paint has peeled leprous coupés; in their blank windows shines the glint of interminable gaslamps; they are burying despair!

Joyously I turn into the wineshop where with strumming 

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