Classic Poem

AB ALLAD

It is uttered by the sea gull, it is written in Thames' clay
On the pavement, by the hobnails, what Thames River has to say.
The word goes up distinctly, by the wharves of wood and stone:

" I am placid, I am patient, I've a warrant of my own.
The Earth contributes counsel, I've a mandate from the Sun,
My tides are dark responses of the Sea and of the Moon.

I laid the earth with labour, down and vale and weald and wold,
I fed the ancient forests and I spread abroad the mould.
The giants that scoffed at heaven I have humbled to the floor,
And I who writ in water have a name for ever more.

The North Sea's bed has record of my tribute to the Rhine,
ere our waters were embittered by the breaking in of brine,
when together we swept onward to the Barriers of Ice
and set a limit southward to their siege of Paradise.
But when the ice-locked underseas which swelled with warmer years
behind the polar barricades and fantastic glaciers
with weight of water split the walls of their crystalline cave,
then Ocean poised above the world, came downward in a Wave.
And the high wild places saw, as they quaked above the dam,
ATLANTIS founder, ad majorem Dei gloriam .
(And a word comes out of Cornwall of a people very old,
Whose sires escaped the Great Wave which engulfed the Age of Gold).

Therefore I tell you plainly, nor pretend to prophesy,
Knowing only facts like soil and roots and rock that cannot lie:

God knows what vasty cons, and what planetary toil
Of heat and wind and water, made and laid the basic soil.
The leaves that fall in Autumn shower the land with more than gold,
The capital and income of the fields cannot be told.

The earth's fee simple is not held by law and title deed
But by every grant of heaven to importunate potent seed.
Yet are men mad for tarmac, to extend it on the loam
And pile preventive of my good colossal block and dome.

So they forbid the grass root and the lillies and the trees,
But I tell you kings in glory were not robed like one of these;
And for each foot where cities have infringed the fallow earth,
Men owe the spirit increase to the equal of its worth.

O the willow beds of Wessex are a dim and aching dream
When the overlying rock-bed of the town impends my stream
Like lunar wastes of lava from the orb's abysmal seam
Where crowds of the new cliff dwellers in breathless burrows teem,
Before calf-skin ledgers cringing and by ledgers made supreme.

For know, I, Thames, am not confined by silver creek and coil,
I am every raindrop sinking through the particles of soil.
Unseen upon the hilltops THAME and ISIS mingled lie,
Nor are MOLE and WEY divided in their meads, but all am I.

But certain of my streams walled in like gutters of the street,
I am bereft them, WANDLE and the River LEA and FLEET,
And I am hemmed by wizards in a magic ambuscade
who limit Me, Thames River, to the service of their trade.
They despise my loamy floodings of the fields, and they despise
my finny shoals, and scornfully they feed themselves on lies.

I have lost my rushy margins and the little fish that leap,
I am shamed under heaven, I am shamed in the deep.

But though they plant the chimney and the steel and concrete shell
In trespass of green meadows, asphalt over asphodel,
In phalanx launched against the light, cubic and parallel,
Vying with those vain builders at the Ziggurat of Bel,
The eyes of drowned skulls declare, They have not darkened Hell.

Southwark is a holy land, Bermondsey is sacred,
Snow white saints patrol the Strand, crimson, gold and lake-red,
They proceeding hand in hand nod their haloes nacred,
Nostrils to sweet scents expand finding nothing acrid.

So sings a saint at Osney, underneath her tumbled screen
And bids me haste to Southwark to the shrine of Magdalene.

Near the Bridge my Lady prays, kneeling by her chancel,
Round her burn like candle rays Pity and Good Counsel,
She computes the load of praise due by long denial
Charged on dismal alley ways and on Palace Royal.
Tell her, Thames, as you slide by, that I still am loyal.

And a voice comes up from seaward, where the flood tides chop and chafe
Against the southern dockside, by the Glebe of Sanct Olafe.

Eastward of the Bridge's end, Olaf has his chapel;
From the Kelts he brought the Cross
Northward even to Nidaros
Back to his Norse people,
Laid waste Odin's temenos and built Trondheim steeple;
With craft and with brawn: he routed the Thorsmen,
Sailing the midnight dawn: with many oarsmen.
Much fraud, much force dismays: this fearful city;
Patiently now he prays: in faith and pity.