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 perchèd home
    Where hold wise converse daily
    The loftier and the lesser dome,
    St Paul's and the Old Bailey.

John Collings Squire, Sir

John Collings Squire, also known as Sir John Squire, was an influential British poet, writer, historian, and influential literary editor of the early 20th century. He is best known for his role as editor of the London Mercury, a powerful literary journal of the time. Squire was a leading figure in the Georgian poetry movement, which sought to return English poetry to its traditional form and diction.

John Collings Squire, Sir

Music - (Twelve Translations From Charles Baudelaire)

John Collings Squire, Sir, Simple Poetry

Tree-Tops

John Collings Squire, Sir, Simple Poetry

To A Bull-Dog

John Collings Squire, Sir, Simple Poetry

The Owls - (Twelve Translations From Charles Baudelaire)

John Collings Squire, Sir, Simple Poetry

English

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London Voluntaries - To Charles Whibley - II - Andante Con Moto

Forth from the dust and din,
The crush, the heat, the many-spotted glare,
The odour and sense of life and lust aflare,
The wrangle and jangle of unrests,
Let us take horse, Dear Heart, take horse and win -
As from swart August to the green lap of May -
To quietness and the fresh and fragrant breasts
Of the still, delicious night, not yet aware
In any of her innumerable nests
Of that first sudden plash of dawn,
Clear, sapphirine, luminous, large,
Which tells that soon the flowing springs of day
In deep and ever deeper eddies drawn
Forward and up, in wider and wider way,
Shall float the sands, and brim the shores,
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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
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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

J. D. C. Fellow

A Ballad Of London - (To H. W. Massinsham)

Ah, London! London! our delight,
Great flower that opens but at night,
Great City of the Midnight Sun,
Whose day begins when day is done.

Lamp after lamp against the sky
Opens a sudden beaming eye,
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Like dragonflies, the hansoms hover,
With jewelled eyes, to catch the lover;
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Soft gowns, and flutter of soiled doves.

The human moths about the light
Dash and cling close in dazed delight,
And burn and laugh, the world and wife,
For this is London, this is life!

Upon thy petals butterflies,
But at thy root, some say, there lies
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Poor worms that have not eyes or wings.

From out corr...

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London Voluntaries - To Charles Whibley - III - Scherzando

Down through the ancient Strand
The spirit of October, mild and boon
And sauntering, takes his way
This golden end of afternoon,
As though the corn stood yellow in all the land,
And the ripe apples dropped to the harvest-moon.

Lo! the round sun, half-down the western slope -
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With aspects generous and bland;
Making a thousand harnesses to shine
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There Stands A City.

INGOLDSBY.



Year by year do Beauty's daughters,
In the sweetest gloves and shawls,
Troop to taste the Chattenham waters,
And adorn the Chattenham balls.

'Nulla non donanda lauru'
Is that city: you could not,
Placing England's map before you,
Light on a more favoured spot.

If no clear translucent river
Winds 'neath willow-shaded paths,
"Children and adults" may shiver
All day in "Chalybeate baths:"

If "the inimitable Fechter"
Never brings the gallery down,
Constantly "the Great Protector"
There "rejects the British crown:"

And on every side the painter
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And on fair hills, faint and fainter
Outlined as they near the main.

There I met with him, my chosen
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A Strange City

A wondrous city, that had temples there
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I looked with awe on iron gates that could
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I saw tall mounted spires shine in the sun,
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William Henry Davies