Written by
John Betjeman |
The heavy mahogany door with its wrought-iron screen
Shuts. And the sound is rich, sympathetic, discreet.
The sun still shines on this eighteenth-century scene
With Edwardian faience adornment -- Devonshire Street.
No hope. And the X-ray photographs under his arm
Confirm the message. His wife stands timidly by.
The opposite brick-built house looks lofty and calm
Its chimneys steady against the mackerel sky.
No hope. And the iron knob of this palisade
So cold to the touch, is luckier now than he
"Oh merciless, hurrying Londoners! Why was I made
For the long and painful deathbed coming to me?"
She puts her fingers in his, as, loving and silly
At long-past Kensington dances she used to do
"It's cheaper to take the tube to Piccadilly
And then we can catch a nineteen or twenty-two".
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Written by
Barry Tebb |
“Remember, you loved me, when we were young, one day”
The words of the song in Tauber’s mellifluous tenor
Haunt my nights and days, make me tremble when I hear
Your voice on the phone, sadden me when I can’t make into your smile
The pucker of your lips, the gleam in your eye.
The day we met is with me still, you asked directions
And on the way we chatted. You told me how you’d left
Lancashire for Leeds, went to the same TC as me, even liked poetry
Both were looking for an ‘interesting evening class’
Instead we found each other.
You took me back for tea to the flat in Headingley
You shared with two other girls. The class in Moortown
Was a disaster. Walking home in the rain I put my arm
Around you and you did not resist, we shared your umbrella
Then we kissed.
I liked the taste of your lips, the tingle of your fingertips,
Your mild perfume. When a sudden gust blew your umbrella inside out
We sheltered underneath a cobbled arch, a rainy arch, a rainbow arch.
“I’m sorry”, you said about nothing in particular, perhaps the class
Gone wrong, the weather, I’ll never know but there were tears in your eyes
But perhaps it was just the rain. We kissed again and I felt
Your soft breasts and smelt the hair on your neck and I was lost to you
And you to me perhaps, I’ll never know.
We went to plays, I read my poems aloud in quiet places,
I met your mother and you met mine. We quarrelled over stupid things.
When my best friend seduced you I blamed him and envied him
And tried to console you when you cried a whole day through.
The next weekend I had the flu and insisted you came to look after me
In my newly-rented bungalow. Out of the blue I said, “What you did for him
You can do for me”. It was not the way our first and only love-making
Should have been, you guilty and regretful, me resentful and not tender.
When I woke I saw you in the half-light naked, curled and innocent
I truly loved you If I’d proposed you might have agreed, I’ll never know.
A month later you were pregnant and I was not the father.
I wanted to help you with the baby, wanted you to stay with me
So I could look after you and be there for the birth but your mind
Was set elsewhere end I was too immature to understand or care.
When I saw you again you had Sarah and I had Brenda, my wife-to-be;
Three decades of nightmare ahead with neither of our ‘adult children’
Quite right, both drink to excess and have been on wards.
Nor has your life been a total success, full-time teaching till you retired
Then Victim Support: where’s that sharp mind, that laughter and that passion?
And what have I to show?
A few pamphlets, a small ‘Selected’, a single good review.
Sat in South Kensington on the way to the Institut I wrote this,
Too frightened even to phone you.
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Written by
T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot |
Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer were a very notorious couple
of cats.
As knockabout clown, quick-change comedians, tight-rope
walkers and acrobats
They had extensive reputation. They made their home in
Victoria Grove--
That was merely their centre of operation, for they were
incurably given to rove.
They were very well know in Cornwall Gardens, in Launceston
Place and in Kensington Square--
They had really a little more reputation than a couple of
cats can very well bear.
If the area window was found ajar
And the basement looked like a field of war,
If a tile or two came loose on the roof,
Which presently ceased to be waterproof,
If the drawers were pulled out from the bedroom chests,
And you couldn't find one of your winter vests,
Or after supper one of the girls
Suddenly missed her Woolworth pearls:
Then the family would say: "It's that horrible cat!
It was Mungojerrie--or Rumpelteazer!"-- And most of the time
they left it at that.
Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer had a very unusual gift of the
gab.
They were highly efficient cat-burglars as well, and
remarkably smart at smash-and-grab.
They made their home in Victoria Grove. They had no regular
occupation.
They were plausible fellows, and liked to engage a friendly
policeman in conversation.
When the family assembled for Sunday dinner,
With their minds made up that they wouldn't get thinner
On Argentine joint, potatoes and greens,
And the cook would appear from behind the scenes
And say in a voice that was broken with sorrow:
"I'm afraid you must wait and have dinner tomorrow!
For the joint has gone from the oven-like that!"
Then the family would say: "It's that horrible cat!
It was Mungojerrie--or Rumpelteazer!"-- And most of the time
they left it at that.
Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer had a wonderful way of working
together.
And some of the time you would say it was luck, and some of
the time you would say it was weather.
They would go through the house like a hurricane, and no sober
person could take his oath
Was it Mungojerrie--or Rumpelteazer? or could you have sworn
that it mightn't be both?
And when you heard a dining-room smash
Or up from the pantry there came a loud crash
Or down from the library came a loud ping
From a vase which was commonly said to be Ming--
Then the family would say: "Now which was which cat?
It was Mungojerrie! AND Rumpelteazer!"-- And there's nothing
at all to be done about that!
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Written by
Willa Cather |
"ROWSES, Rowses! Penny a bunch!" they tell you--
Slattern girls in Trafalgar, eager to sell you.
Roses, roses, red in the Kensington sun,
Holland Road, High Street, Bayswater, see you and smell you--
Roses of London town, red till the summer is done.
Roses, roses, locust and lilac, perfuming
West End, East End, wondrously budding and blooming
Out of the black earth, rubbed in a million hands,
Foot-trod, sweat-sour over and under, entombing
Highways of darkness, deep gutted with iron bands.
"Rowses, rowses! Penny a bunch!" they tell you,
Ruddy blooms of corruption, see you and smell you,
Born of stale earth, fallowed with squalor and tears--
North shire, south shire, none are like these, I tell you,
Roses of London perfumed with a thousand years.
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Written by
Matthew Arnold |
In this lone, open glade I lie,
Screen'd by deep boughs on either hand;
And at its end, to stay the eye,
Those black-crown'd, red-boled pine-trees stand!
Birds here make song, each bird has his,
Across the girdling city's hum.
How green under the boughs it is!
How thick the tremulous sheep-cries come!
Sometimes a child will cross the glade
To take his nurse his broken toy;
Sometimes a thrush flit overhead
Deep in her unknown day's employ.
Here at my feet what wonders pass,
What endless, active life is here!
What blowing daisies, fragrant grass!
An air-stirr'd forest, fresh and clear.
Scarce fresher is the mountain-sod
Where the tired angler lies, stretch'd out,
And, eased of basket and of rod,
Counts his day's spoil, the spotted trout.
In the huge world, which roars hard by,
Be others happy if they can!
But in my helpless cradle I
Was breathed on by the rural Pan.
I, on men's impious uproar hurl'd,
Think often, as I hear them rave,
That peace has left the upper world
And now keeps only in the grave.
Yet here is peace for ever new!
When I who watch them am away,
Still all things in this glade go through
The changes of their quiet day.
Then to their happy rest they pass!
The flowers upclose, the birds are fed,
The night comes down upon the grass,
The child sleeps warmly in his bed.
Calm soul of all things! make it mine
To feel, amid the city's jar,
That there abides a peace of thine,
Man did not make, and cannot mar.
The will to neither strive nor cry,
The power to feel with others give!
Calm, calm me more! nor let me die
Before I have begun to live.
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Written by
Louise Gluck |
En robe de parade.
Samain
Like a skien of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anaemia.
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.
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Written by
Rudyard Kipling |
Beneath the deep veranda's shade,
When bats begin to fly,
I sit me down and watch -- alas! --
Another evening die.
Blood-red behind the sere ferash
She rises through the haze.
Sainted Diana! can that be
The Moon of Other Days?
Ah! shade of little Kitty Smith,
Sweet Saint of Kensington!
Say, was it ever thus at Home
The Moon of August shone,
When arm in arm we wandered long
Through Putney's evening haze,
And Hammersmith was Heaven beneath
The moon of Other Days?
But Wandle's stream is Sutlej now,
And Putney's evening haze
The dust that half a hundered kine
Before my window raise.
Unkempt, unclean, athwart the mist
The seething city looms,
In place of Putney's golden gorse
The sickly babul blooms.
Glare down, old Hecate, through the dust,
And bid the pie-dog yell,
Draw from the drain its typhoid-term,
From each bazaar its smell;
Yea, suck the fever from the tank
And sap my strength therewith:
Thank Heaven, you show a smiling face
To little Kitty Smith!
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Written by
Rudyard Kipling |
(Made Yeomanry towards End of Boer War)
Only two African kopjes,
Only the cart-tracks that wind
Empty and open between 'em,
Only the Transvaal behind;
Only an Aldershot column
Marching to conquer the land . . .
Only a sudden and solemn
Visit, unarmed, to the Rand.
Then scorn not the African kopje,
The kopje that smiles in the heat,
The wholly unoccupied kopje,
The home of Cornelius and Piet.
You can never be sure of your kopje,
But of this be you blooming well sure,
A kopje is always a kopje,
And a Boojer is always a Boer!
Only two African kopjes,
Only the vultures above,
Only baboons--at the bottom,
Only some buck on the move;
Only a Kensington draper
Only pretending to scout . . .
.Only bad news for the paper,
Only another knock-out.
Then mock not the African kopje,
And rub not your flank on its side,
The silent and simmering kopje,
The kopje beloved by the guide.
You can never be, etc.
Only two African kopjes,
Only the dust of their wheels,
Only a bolted commando,
Only our guns at their heels . . .
Only a little barb-wire,
Only a natural fort,
Only "by sections retire,"
Only "regret to report! "
Then mock not the .African kopje,
Especially when it is twins,
One sharp and one table-topped kopje
For that's where the trouble begins.
You never can be, etc.
Only two African kopjes
Baited the same as before--
Only we've had it so often,
Only we're taking no more . . .
Only a wave to our troopers,
Only our flanks swinging past,
Only a dozen voorloopers,.
Only we've learned it at last!
Then mock not the African kopje,
But take off your hat to the same,
The patient, impartial old kopje,
The kopje that taught us the game!
For all that we knew in the Columns,
And all they've forgot on the Staff,
We learned at the Fight o' Two Kopjes,
Which lasted two years an' a half.
0 mock not the African kopje,
Not even when peace has been signed--
The kopje that isn't a kopje--
The kopje that copies its kind.
You can never be sure of your kopje,
But of this be you blooming well sure,
That a kopje is always a kopje,
And a Boojer is always a Boer!
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Written by
Andrew Barton Paterson |
I left the course, and by my side
There walked a ruined tout --
A hungry creature, evil-eyed,
Who poured this story out.
"You see," he said, "there came a swell
To Kensington today,
And, if I picked the winners well,
A crown at least he's pay.
"I picked three winners straight, I did;
I filled his purse with pelf,
And then he gave me half-a-quid
To back one for myself.
"A half-a-quid to me he cast --
I wanted it indeed;
So help me Bob, for two days past
I haven't had a feed.
"But still I thought my luck was in,
I couldn't go astray --
I put it all on Little Min,
And lost it straightaway.
"I haven't got a bite or bed,
I'm absolutely stuck;
So keep this lesson in your head:
Don't over-trust your luck!"
The folks went homeward, near and far,
The tout, oh! where is he?
Ask where the empty boilers are
Beside the Circular Quay.
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