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.