The Midnight Skaters

The Midnight Skaters
Edmund Blunden
https://allpoetry.com/The-Midnight-Skaters
The hop-poles stand in cones,
The icy pond lurks under,
The pole-tops steeple to the thrones
Of stars, sound gulfs of wonder;
But not the tallest thee, 'tis said,
Could fathom to this pond's black bed.
Then is not death at watch
Within those secret waters?
What wants he but to catch
Earth's heedless sons and daughters?
With but a crystal parapet
Between, he has his engines set.

Then on, blood shouts, on, on,
Twirl, wheel and whip above him,
Dance on this ball-floor thin and wan,
Use him as though you love him;
Court him, elude him, reel and pass,
And let him hate you through the glass.
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Blunden returned to England in 1927. where he returned to military service as a staff member of the Oxford Training Corps and enjoyed his most productive period as an essayist and prose writer, publishing On the Poems of Henry Vaughn (1927), Leigh Hunt’s “Examiner” Examined (1928), and Nature in English Literature (1929), a volume in Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Lectures on English Literature series. Nature in English Literature is much more than literary criticism; it is Blunden’s lay sermon on nature, his affirmation of faith in the spirit of the English countryside, and his argument for the inseparability of English literature from the Englishman’s love of nature. To Blunden, remarks Fussell, “the countryside is magical. It is as precious as English literature, with which indeed it is almost identical. ... To Blunden, both the countryside and English literature are ‘alive,’ and both have ‘feelings.’”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edmund-blunden