Here you will find thePoemNurembergof poet Kenneth Slessor
So quiet it was in that high, sun-steeped room, So warm and still, that sometimes with the light 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 town?s Quaint horologe could Time intrude . . . you?d say Clocks had been bolted out, the flux of years Defied, and that high chamber sealed away From earthly change by some old alchemist. And, oh, those thousand towers of Nuremberg Flowering like leaden trees outside the panes: Those gabled roofs with smoking cowls, and those Encrusted spires of stone, those golden vanes On shining housetops paved with scarlet tiles! And all day nine wrought-pewter manticores Blinked from their spouting faucets, not five steps Across the cobbled street, or, peering through The rounds of glass, espied that sun-flushed room With Dürer graving at intaglios. O happy nine, spouting your dew all day In green-scaled rows of metal, whilst the town Moves peacefully below in quiet joy . . . O happy gargoyles to be gazing down On Albrecht Dürer and his plates of iron!
