Faruk Ahmed Roni Poet Free verse

Notes About The Poem

About the Poem – Between Thames and Seine

This poem captures my personal journey between London and Paris, two cities I hold close to my heart. Travelling through the Channel Tunnel felt like moving not only across geography, but through layers of art, history, and memory. I wanted to show that the distance between Thames and Seine is not a separation, but a connection shaped by creativity, culture, and shared legacy.

The poem uses the train journey as a metaphor for travelling between worlds of inspiration. London’s literary, artistic depth and Paris’s poetic, romantic spirit meet beneath the sea, where histories silently clasp hands. I tried to weave together the voices of Blake, Tennyson, Turner, Baudelaire, Hugo, and also Michael Madhusudan Dutt, whose story forms a bridge from East to West, just as the tunnel bridges the two cities.

For me, this poem is about movement, not only through a tunnel, but through ideas, emotions, and centuries of artistic dialogue. It reflects how I felt as I crossed from one cultural heartbeat to another, carrying not luggage, but imagination, memory, and the shared language of art.

Between Thames and Seine

Beneath the sea, the train slips into shadow,
a vessel of murmur wrapped in motion,
threading two empires of thought and stone.
London behind, Paris ahead, history pulsing 
in the dark between.
Above us, the English Channel stirs,
unaware of the weight we carry,
not luggage, but centuries of verse, of vision,
of the painted and the sung.
That train runs fast and faster,
The greens disappearing on both sides in a blink.

Thames and Seine, bonded with art and culture,
love and affection from London to Paris.
London, 
where the Thames glides slowly with solemn pride,
It's banks cradling the ghost of Blake,
His angels watching over soot and smoke.
Tennyson once stood tall there,
Laureate of crown and grief,
His odes echoing in the marble hush of Westminster.

Turner’s storms still burn across the canvas sky,
while the city folds its myths into stone and spire,
its bridges heavy with memory.
The tunnel comes not as absence,
but as a breath held long beneath history’s weight.
The English Channel, a wonder of the world,
filled with miles to touch each coast,
a bridge of silence, a passage of dreams,
where steel and longing meet.

Paris rises, soft with light,
The Seine a ribbon of gold in afternoon hush.
The Louvre gleams with the hush of reverence,
Mona Lisa’s quiet, endless gaze,
Leonardo’s sigh forever caught in oil and air.

Here, verse spills from café tables,
Baudelaire’s decadent lilies, Rimbaud’s revolts,
and Hugo’s granite grandeur,
each echoing through boulevards like 
steps in the wet after-rain.

In Versailles, once walked a stranger
whose name would alight in Bengal:
Michael Madhusudan Dutt, exiled, eloquent,
who carved epics in a borrowed tongue,
then gave it back transformed.
In marble gardens, he mourned his motherland,
His Duttabharati heart bridging Kopotakkho to Seine with sonnet and sorrow, 
East to West in measured meters.

Two cities not divided by sea,
but bound beneath it, stone clasping stone,
poem clasping poem, Madhusudan to Milton,
Turner to Monet,
London and Paris, a pair of eternal mirrors,
in love with beauty, in dialogue forever.



We pass beneath that unspoken vow,
carried by steel, by memory,
by the quiet rhythm of art continuing.

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