Nuremberg

So quiet it was in that high, sun-steeped room,

So warm and still, that sometimes with the

Through the great windows, bright with bottle-panes,

There’d float a chime from clock-jacks out of sight,    Clapping iron mallets on green copper gongs.

But only in blown music from the

Quaint horologe could Time intrude . . . you’d

Clocks had been bolted out, the flux of

Defied, and that high chamber sealed away    From earthly change by some old alchemist.

And, oh, those thousand towers of

Flowering like leaden trees outside the panes:

Those gabled roofs with smoking cowls, and

Encrusted spires of stone, those golden vanes    On shining housetops paved with scarlet tiles!

And all day nine wrought-pewter

Blinked from their spouting faucets, not five

Across the cobbled street, or, peering

The rounds of glass, espied that sun-flushed room    With Dürer graving at intaglios.

O happy nine, spouting your dew all

In green-scaled rows of metal, whilst the

Moves peacefully below in quiet joy . . .

O happy gargoyles to be gazing down    On Albrecht Dürer and his plates of iron!