City of Verse: A London Poetry Trail: City Trails

By Kit Ward

Love exploring London? Love poetry? Then City of Verse: A London Poetry Trail is for you. Discover a new angle on the capital while spending time with some of its greatest writers. This guided walk through central London will take you to twenty-four sites associated with notable poets and poems. Explore the city's literary past while visiting some of its most interesting places, from the famous to the lesser known.

 

The trail begins at Shakespeare's Globe in Southwark and ends at the former site of Gatehouse Prison by Westminster Abbey. Your companions on the journey include William Shakespeare, John Keats, and TE Hulme, along with twenty-one other poets, each with their unique take on the life of the city. Experience London in a new and distinctive way, and go exploring with City of Verse: A London Poetry Trail as your guide.

 

Features

• Twenty-four poems selected from six hundred years of literature
• Introductory notes on each place, poet and poem
• Full route directions, with GPS coordinates for each stop
• Google Maps route map and directions available on-line and for download to your smartphone

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prydain Press
• Release date: Mar 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781916469303

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

‘London, thou art of townes A per se’

London, thou art of townes A per se.

Soveraign of cities, semeliest in sight,

Of high renoun, riches, and royaltie,

Of lordis, barons, and many goodly knyght;

Of most delectable lusty ladies bright,

Of famous prelatis in habitis clericall,

Of merchauntis full of substaunce and myght:

London, thou art the flour of Cities all.

Gladdith anon, thou lusty Troy Novaunt,

Citie that some tyme cleped was New Troy,

In all the erth, imperiall as thou stant,

Pryncesse of townes, of pleasure, and of joy;

A richer restith under no Christen roy;

For manly power, with craftis naturall,

Fourmeth none fairer sith the flode of Noy:

London, thou art the flour of Cities all.

— William Dunbar

Glossary

A per se unique

prelatis prelates

merchauntis merchants

flour flower

Novaunt New

gladdith rejoice

cleped called

stant stands

roy king

sith since

Noy Noah

London Poets

They trod the streets and squares where now I tread,

With weary hearts, a little while ago;

When, thin and grey, the melancholy snow

Clung to the leafless branches overhead;

Or when the smoke-veiled sky grew stormy-red

In autumn; with a re-arisen woe

Wrestled, what time the passionate spring winds blow;

And paced scorched stones in summer:—they are dead.

The sorrow of their souls to them did seem

As real as mine to me, as permanent.

Today, it is the shadow of a dream,

The half-forgotten breath of breeze spent.

So shall another soothe his woe supreme—

‘No more he comes, who this way came and went.’

— Amy Levy

The poems that open this Introduction capture two moods of London poetry: one celebratory, the other melancholy. Once they are familiar with the city, the resident and the visitor will have experienced each of these moods, and many more besides. London’s ability to provoke a range of ideas, emotions and perceptions has made it fertile ground for poets. With its vastness, history and contrasts, it can be stirring, stately and sorrowful, sometimes all at once.

The first poem of this pair dates from the sixteenth century and was traditionally ascribed to William Dunbar, a Scottish court poet. Dunbar was a member of the delegation that came to London to discuss the marriage of James IV of Scotland to Margaret, daughter of Henry VII. The poem was supposedly written during this visit and read at a banquet given by the Lord Mayor of London in Christmas week of 1501. While more recent scholarship has cast doubt on this attribution, it is agreed that the poet was a Scot, that he held some official position, and that the poem was intended to flatter his hosts. In a nod to the importance of civic genealogy, there is a reference to the legend that Brutus, a grandson of the Trojan exile Aeneas, founded London as New Troy. It is conceivable the poem was viewed as extreme in its hyperbole even at the time, but London has been astounding and enthralling (and sometimes repelling) visitors for centuries.

The second of these introductory poets, Amy Levy, was a Londoner, born in Clapham in 1861, and the first Jewish woman to go to Cambridge University. Levy was a feminist, a freethinker, and a lesbian in orientation if perhaps not in practice. Her life was brief and often unhappy, marred by depression and relationship troubles, but she produced three novels, three verse collections and many essays in that time. Her poem may be a sombre way to begin our journey, but it captures a distinctive London mood. It displays the acute awareness that many London poets have possessed of those writers who came before them. That awareness of the grand tradition can be both inspiring and overwhelming.

This book is a small selection of London verse, intended to be read and enjoyed during a walk through London’s streets, past some of the places that inspired the poems. Cities are built by the imagination as well as the hand. And every city from its foundation has had its songs and poems. Verse flows through London’s history as the great River Thames flows through its topographic heart.

A note on the poems

There are many poems about London and many London poets. In order to construct a serial trail that can be walked in a reasonably leisurely way, I had to introduce several restrictions. First, each poem in the selection should be about a specific place in London (I then broke this rule twice, for Edmund Spenser and William Blake, neither of whom I wanted to leave out).

Second, the geographic range of the walk should be confined to central London.

Third, the poems should not be in copyright, which rules out most twentieth-century verse and accounts for the dearth of female poets. This was an unhappy but practical decision: the time and expense involved in getting copyright holders’ permission was beyond my resources. To digress, it baffles me that so many early twentieth-century poets are still in copyright, but there it is.

Despite these restrictions, I hope the reader will find this an entertaining selection, representing something of what HG Wells called London’s ‘pregnant totality’.

Poems are given in full, with a few exceptions where the length is unsuitable for the combined activity of walking and reading. Spelling is usually modernized, except for the Scots verse above, for which I have provided a short glossary, the extract from the ‘Prologue’ of the Canterbury Tales, where I have also provided a nineteenth-century verse translation, and ‘London Lickpenny’, which I have glossed in workaday prose. I encourage the reader especially to try reading Chaucer’s original Middle English: it is fun and also a kind of time travel.

The structure of each entry is the same: route directions, a note on the history of the place, a summary of the poet’s life (if known), an introduction to the poem, and then the poem itself. The supplementary information is brief and can be ignored, but my intention was for it to enhance enjoyment of the poems, the places, and the trail.

A note on terms

London’s historical growth has led to some confusing terms. Roman and medieval London covered about the same area and the city of those times was enclosed within fortified walls. References to the ‘City’ or the ‘City of London’ refer to this area, which has kept to this day its own distinct administration, police force, and by-laws. References to the ‘city’, i.e. in lower case, refer to London as a whole, or Greater London as it is now called. The borough of Westminster, which covers the greater part of central London, is officially titled the ‘City of Westminster’. It originated as little more than a village centred around Westminster Abbey, which was then enlarged by the royal Palace of Whitehall. The road between these Cities, London and Westminster, was the Strand. As dwellings and businesses clustered around this route, the two Cities become one London.

A note on routes and directions

For each stop on the trail, I have provided GPS coordinates, the nearest underground station, and route instructions (in italics at the beginning of each chapter). The latter may not always provide the shortest route between two stops, but should be the simplest and (sometimes) the most scenic path. If you prefer, you can enter the GPS coordinates into whatever maps app you have on your phone and get to the stop that way.

A word of warning: the GPS information is intended for walkers and not drivers. In fact, I urge you not to drive to any of these sites: the roads will be congested, there will be nowhere to park, and, if you set the GPS coordinates and keep driving, there is a fair chance you will demolish part of