WHITMAN IN LONDON.
(Adapted from the American.)
A Salt and Battery.
Oh, site of Coldbath Fields Prison!
Oh, eight and three-quarter acres of potential Park for the plebs!
I gaze at you; I, Walt, gaze at you through cracks in the
black hoarding,
Though the helmeted blue-coated Bobby dilates to me on the
advantages of moving on.
I marvel at the stupidity of Authorities everywhere.
I stand and inhale a playground which in a week or two will be turned
into a Post Office by Government orders!
Instead of plants growing here, bricks will be planted.
Instead of girlhood, boyhood playing here, cash will be counted, stamps
will be affixed (savagely) by the public, and letters weighed when
the young women have time, and also inclination, to do so.
I, from the wild Western Continent, wilder myself, weep for this Park
soon to be devoured.
I am like a buck-jumper: I buck at it.
I am like the Giant Cowboy: only I am not gigantic, and I am cowed by it.
Oh, Northerly end of Farringdon Street! Oh, Coldbath Fields Square!
Oh, dwellers in all the adjacent slums and rookeries, redolent of
old clothes' shops, swarthy Italian organ-grinders, and the
superannuated herring,
Are you going to see another House of Correction—a Postal one—built
where the old one stood?
If so, it is I who correct you: I, who am so correct myself!
And you, too, Clerkenwell Gaol!
What are the dodrotted Authorities going to do with you?
Eh? Clear you away, and build a Board School there?
But why build anything?
Clerkenwell is mine: I am à propos of Clerkenwell: Clerkenwell is
à propos of me.
Morally, if not legally, it is mine; morally it is yours as well, you
wizened, pallid, blue-nosed, dunderheaded Metropolitan Citizen!
In this jungle of houses, what is wanted is fresh air.
Everyone of you toilers should be given the real "Freedom of the City,"
by having free spaces bestowed on you.
It is better to learn how to expand the limbs, and play rounders, and
leap over the frog, and fly kites,
Than to acquire in a school-room elementary education, consisting of
algebra and Assyrian hieroglyphics, spelling, Greek, Italian, and
advanced trigonometry.
Allons, then! Esperanza! Also cui bono! Go to your Home
Secretary, your Postmaster in General, and tell them that no
Post Office or School shall be built on this spot,
Because I, Walt, hailing hoarsely from Manhattan, have spotted it,
And Punch, the lustrous camerado, the ineffable dispensator, will
spot it too!
