This has always been my favorite Sherlock Holmes poem. I just rediscovered it today.
Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game's afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears--
Only those things the heart believes are true.
A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.
One good thing about all this brouhaha over the 2009 film is that the love of Sherlockian purists is made only stronger. I haven't reread the stories in years and now I think I will. I can remember when I used to print out Sherlock Holmes illustrations and poems and frame them, or paste them on notebook covers and folders. None of my classmates ever understood or felt the same but I did have the comfort of the Internet; I knew that somewhere, somehow, the Diogenes Club was sitting down to breakfast to commemorate Professor Moriarty, or having a tribute to roses (the one flower Holmes singled out and praised).
Here's to you, Holmes. My life is crazy and everything in it seems to be changing for the worse, until I don't know what to hold on to, but part of me always feels secure--because it's always 1895.
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