Monody on the Death of Aldersgate Street Station

Snow falls in the buffet of Aldersgate station,

    Soot hangs in the tunnel in clouds of steam.

City of London! before the next desecration

    Let your steepled forest of churches be my theme.

Sunday Silence! with every street a dead street,

    Alley and courtyard empty and cobbled mews,

Till “tingle tang” the bell of St. Mildred’s Bread Street

    Summoned the sermon taster to high box pews,

And neighbouring towers and spirelets joined the ringing

    With answering echoes from heavy commercial walls

Till all were drowned as the sailing clouds went singing

    On the roaring flood of a twelve-voiced peal from Paul’s.

Then would the years fall off and Thames run slowly;

    Out into marshy meadow-land flowed the Fleet:

And the walled-in City of London, smelly and holy,

    Had a tinkling mass house in every cavernous street.

The bells rang down and St. Michael Paternoster

    Would take me into its darkness from College Hill,

Or Christ Church Newgate Street (with St. Leonard Foster)

    Would be late for Mattins and ringing insistent still.

Last of the east wall sculpture, a cherub gazes

    On broken arches, rosebay, bracken and dock,

Where once I heard the roll of the Prayer Book phrases

    And the sumptuous tick of the old west gallery clock.

Snow falls in the buffet of Aldersgate station,

    Toiling and doomed from Moorgate Street puffs the train,

For us of the steam and the gas-light, the lost generation,

    The new white cliffs of the City are built in vain.