Meditation on a Constable Picture

Go back in your mind to that Middlesex height

Whence Constable painted the breeze and the light

As down out of Hampstead descended the chaise

To the wide-spreading valley, half-hidden in haze:

The slums of St. Giles’s, St. Mary’bone’s farms,

And Chelsea’s and Battersea’s riverside charms,

The palace of Westminster, towers of the Abbey

And Mayfair so elegant, Soho so shabby,

The mansions where lilac hangs over brown brick,

The ceilings whose plaster is floral and thick,

The new stucco terraces facing the park,

The odorous alleyways, narrow and dark,

The hay barges sailing, the watermen rowing

On a Thames unembanked which was wide and slow-flowing,

The street-cries rebounding from pavements and walls

And, steeple-surrounded, the dome of St. Paul’s.

No market nor High Street nor square was the same

In that cluster of villages, London by name.

Ere slabs are too tall and we Cockneys too few,

Let us keep what is left of the London we knew.