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Reading comprehension

Folie 2

• Progress
• The city's heat is like a leaden pall—
• Its lowered lamps glow in the midnight air
• Like mammoth orange-moths that flit and flare
• Through the dark tapestry of night. The tall
• Black houses crush the creeping beggars down,
• Who walk beneath and think of breezes cool,
• Of silver bodies bathing in a pool;
• Or trees that whisper in some far, small town
• Whose quiet nursed them, when they thought that
• Was merely metal, not a grave of mould
• In which men bury all that's fine and fair.
• When they could chase the jewelled butterfly
• Through the green bracken-scented lanes or sigh
• For all the future held so rich and rare;
• When, though they knew it not, their baby cries
• Were lovely as the jewelled butterflies.
• by Osbert Sitwell

Folie 3

• The City
• When, sick of all the sorrow and distress
• That flourished in the City like foul weeds,
• I sought blue rivers and green, opulent meads,
• And leagues of unregarded loneliness
• Whereon no foot of man had seemed to press,
• I did not know how great had been my needs,
• How wise the woodland’s gospels and her creeds,
• How good her faith to one long comfortless.
• But in the silence came a Voice to me;
• In every wind it murmured, and I knew
• It would not cease though far my heart might roam.
• It called me in the sunrise and the dew,
• At noon and twilight, sadly, hungrily,
• The jealous City, whispering always—“Home!”
• by Charles Hanson Towne

Folie 4