IN LADY STREET

All day long the traffic goes

In Lady Street by dingy rows

Of sloven houses, tattered shops —

Fried fish, old clothes and fortune-tellers —

Tall trams on silver-shining rails,

With grinding wheels and swaying tops,

And lorries with their corded bales,

And screeching cars. “Buy, buy!” the sellers

Of rags and bones and sickening meat

Cry all day long in Lady Street.

And when the sunshine has its way

In Lady Street, then all the grey

Dull desolation grows in state

More dull and grey and desolate,

And the sun is a shamefast thing,

A lord not comely-housed, a god

Seeing what gods must blush to see,

A song where it is ill to sing,

And each gold ray despiteously

Lies like a gold ironic rod.

Yet one grey man in Lady Street

Looks for the sun. He never bent

Life to his will, his travelling feet

Have scaled no cloudy continent,

Nor has the sickle-hand been strong.

He lives in Lady Street; a bed,

Four cobwebbed walls.

But all day long

A time is singing in his head

Of youth in Gloucester lanes. He hears

The wind among the barley-blades,

The tapping of the woodpeckers

On the smooth beeches, thistle-spades

Slicing the sinewy roots; he sees

The hooded filberts in the copse

Beyond the loaded orchard trees,

The netted avenues of hops;

He smells the honeysuckle thrown

Along the hedge. He lives alone,

Alone — yet not alone, for sweet

Are Gloucester lanes in Lady Street.

Aye, Gloucester lanes. For down below

The cobwebbed room this grey man plies

A trade, a coloured trade. A show

Of many-coloured merchandise

Is in his shop. Brown filberts there,

And apples red with Gloucester air,

And cauliflowers he keeps, and round

Smooth marrows grown on Gloucester ground,

Fat cabbages and yellow plums,

And gaudy brave chrysanthemums.

And times a glossy pheasant lies

Among his store, not Tyrian dyes

More rich than are the neck-feathers;

And times a prize of violets,

Or dewy mushrooms satin-skinned

And times an unfamiliar wind

Robbed of its woodland favour stirs

Gay daffodils this grey man sets

Among his treasure.

All day long

In Lady Street the traffic goes

By dingy houses, desolate rows

Of shops that stare like hopeless eyes.

Day long the sellers cry their cries,

The fortune-tellers tell no wrong

Of lives that know not any right,

And drift, that has not even the will

To drift, toils through the day until

The wage of sleep is won at night.

But this grey man heeds not at all

The hell of Lady Street. His stall

Of many-coloured merchandise

He makes a shining paradise,

As all day long chrysanthemums

He sells, and red and yellow plums

And cauliflowers. In that one spot

Of Lady Street the sun is not

Ashamed to shine and send a rare

Shower of colour through the air;

The grey man says the sun is sweet

On Gloucester lanes in Lady Street.