After London

London Bridge is broken down;
    Green is the grass on Ludgate Hill;
I know a farmer in Camden Town
    Killed a brock by Pentonville.

I have heard my grandam tell
    How some thousand years ago
Houses stretched from Camberwell
    Right to Highbury and Bow.

Down by Shadwell's golden meads
    Tall ships' masts would stand as thick
As the pretty tufted reeds
    That the Wapping children pick.

All the kings from end to end
    Of all the world paid tribute then,
And meekly on their knees would bend
    To the King of the Englishmen.

Thinks I while I dig my plot,
    What if your grandam's tales be true?
Thinks I, be they true or not,
    What's the odds to a fool like you?

Thinks I, while I smoke my pipe
    Here beside the tumbling Fleet,
Apples drop when they are ripe,
    And when they drop are they most sweet.

J. D. C. Fellow

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J. D. C. Fellow

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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 n...

John Collings Squire, Sir

The Old Song

(On the Embankment in stormy weather.)


A livid sky on London
And like iron steeds that rear
A shock of engines halted,
And I knew the end was near:
And something said that far away, over the hills and far away,
There came a crawling thunder and the end of all things here.
For London Bridge is broken down, broken down, broken down,
As digging lets the daylight on the sunken streets of yore,
The lightning looked on London town, the broken bridge of London town,
The ending of a broken road where men shall go no more.

I saw the kings of London town,
The kings that buy and sell,
That built it up with penny loaves
And penny lies as well:
And where the streets were paved with gold, the shrivelled paper shone for gold,
The scorching light of p...

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Highgate

    Angel Inn,
    come off a sign
    blown sideways
    in the sugar and ices
    night.

    Old St. Joseph's
    Cathedral, bottom
    of the hill, here
    Andrew Marvell
    of "coy mistress"
    fame sports a plaque
    remembering "time's
    winged chariot" and
    farther (further!) up
    a quaint pub gives accolades
    (Kudos, too) to the fact, 1666
    nefariously was the plague year
    in London - Parliament Hill,
    a brief arm stretch away,
    posited strangled chickens
    and other assorted heirlooms
    in vain attempt for poesy
    to thwart poxy.

    A stone's throw
    off in Hampstead Heath
    guns (Big Berthas) could
    be heard from the Somme,
    German derigibles...

Paul Cameron Brown

Puck's Song

See you the ferny ride that steals
Into the oak-woods far?
O that was whence they hewed the keels
That rolled to Trafalgar.

And mark you where the ivy clings
To Bayham's mouldering walls?
O there we cast the stout railings
That stand around St. Paul's.

See you the dimpled track that runs
All hollow through the wheat?
O that was where they hauled the guns
That smote King Philip's fleet.

(Out of the Weald, the secret Weald,
Men sent in ancient years,
The horse-shoes red at Flodden Field,
The arrows at Poitiers!)

See you our little mill that clacks,
So busy by the brook?
She has ground her corn and paid her
Ever since Domesday Book.

See you our stilly woods of oak,
And the dread ditch beside?
O that was ...

Rudyard

The River's Tale

Twenty bridges from Tower to Kew,
(Twenty bridges or twenty-two),
Wanted to know what the River knew,
For they were young, and the Thames was old
And this is the tale that River told:,

"I walk my beat before London Town,
Five hours up and seven down.
Up I go till I end my run
At Tide-end-town, which is Teddington.
Down I come with the mud in my hands
And plaster it over the Maplin Sands.
But I'd have you know that these waters of mine
Were once a branch of the River Rhine,
When hundreds of miles to the East I went
And England was joined to the Continent.

"I remember the bat-winged lizard-birds,
The Age of Ice and the mammoth herds,
And the giant tigers that stalked them down
Through Regent's Park into Camden Town.
And I remember like...

Rudyard

The Broken Men

For things we never mention,
For Art misunderstood,
For excellent intention
That did not turn to good;
From ancient tales' renewing,
From clouds we would not clear,
Beyond the Law's pursuing
We fled, and settled here.

We took no tearful leaving,
We bade no long good-byes.
Men talked of crime and thieving,
Men wrote of fraud and lies.
To save our injured feelings
'Twas time and time to go,
Behind was dock and Dartmoor,
Ahead lay Callao!

The widow and the orphan
That pray for ten per cent,
They clapped their trailers on us
To spy the road we went.
They watched the foreign sailings
(They scan the shipping still),
And that's your Christian people
Returning good for ill!

God bless the thoughtful islands

Rudyard