And when she shouts down Turnip Street,
"Lawks! of all the dirty sights!
'Enry, quit that puddle quick!"
She has the regal voice that beat
The eardrums of the Israelites,
And turned the tribal bosoms sick.
But when 'Enry drooped and ailed,
And 'Enry from her side was torn
In a hearse down Dingy Lane,
O she wept the lad in vain,
As that other queen bewailed
The slaying of the eldest born.
ATHENS NOW
Behold Athens! What is Athens now?
Cinders and weeds where the eyeballs were, filth for
the marble brow.
Ilissus, Ilissus of the plain?
—Sardine-tins and a dead cat in a drain!
Dead, dead, dead are the Caryatids
Because of the horror that smote their petal-thin lids.
And the Parthenon now is a jawful of yellow teeth
In the snarling skull of an animal humped in death.
For Athens is only a squalor of traders that hope
To retire on the profits from soap.
And the trousers of half of the children of Pallas are
dirty with grease,
And the other half ardently brush them and keep them
in crease.
Then pray, O London, my city, when you are dead,
That none know the place where you reared your mad proud head;
That there be not a mound nor a stone nor even a tree,
But only the ignorant river or the desert sea!
DOWN TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD
Down Tottenham Court Road they ululate,
The droning choruses of Fate.
They walk the length of every wind,
The women who sin, the women who have sinned.
This evening's crime, all immemorial crimes,
Here gather from all lands and times.
Here with Orestes through the mart
Walks the grey lad who stabbed his mother's heart.
Gaunt Clytæmnestra stumbles round the feet
Of Sarah from a Soho street,
Who slew her sallow man to-night
With thin-lipped poison in the street lamp-light.
Pale Helen braids her legendary hair,
Lurking outside a gallery-stair,
While softly through the music calls
Aspasia to her lover in the stalls.
Here broken Orpheus searches, drunken-wild,
Eurydice, the fallen child,
Who, leagues down in the underworld,
Flaunts her white bosom, rouged lips, and gilt hair curled.
Behind the plate-glass windows drum the looms
Of Destinies spinning antique dooms.
The droning choruses of Fate,
Down Tottenham Court Road they ululate.