LINES

When London was a little town

Lean by the river's marge,

The poet paced it with a frown,

He thought it very large.

He loved bright ship and pointing steeple

And bridge with houses loaded

And priests and many-coloured people...

But ah, they were not woaded!

Not all the walls could shed the spell

Of meres and marshes green,

Nor any chaffering merchant tell

The beauty that had been:

The crying birds at fall of night,

The fisher in his coracle,

And, grim on Ludgate's windy height,

An oak-tree and an oracle.

Sick for the past his hair he rent

And dropt a tear in season;

If he had cause for his lament

We have much better reason.

For now the fields and paths he knew

Are coffined all with bricks,

The lucid silver stream he knew

Runs slimy as the Styx;

North and south and east and west,

Far as the eye can travel,

Earth with a sombre web is drest

That nothing can unravel.

And we must wear as black a frown,

Wail with as keen a woe

That London was a little town

Five hundred years ago.

Yet even this place of steamy stir,

This pit of belch and swallow,

With chrism of gold and gossamer

The elements can hallow.

I have a room in Chancery Lane,

High in a world of wires,

Whence fall the roofs a ragged plain

Wooded with many spires.

There in the dawns of summer days

I stand, and there behold

A city veiled in rainbow haze

And spangled all with gold.

The breezes waft abroad the rays

Shot by the waking sun,

A myriad chimneys softly blaze,

A myriad shadows run.

Round the wide rim in radiant mist

The gentle suburbs quiver,

And nearer lies the shining twist

Of Thames, a holy river.

Left and right my vision drifts,

By yonder towers I linger,

Where Westminster's cathedral lifts

Its belled Byzantine finger,

And here against my perched home

Where hold wise converse daily

The loftier and the lesser dome,

St Paul's and the Old Bailey.