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