Category: The Enlightenment & Victorian

The Root of All Evil

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wood street plane
Photo of the London plane tree in Wood Street in the Square Mile (taken by Katie Wignall ?)

The Root of All Evil

“Since it was first hybridised in the 1660s, the London Plane has slowly taken over the world.”

– The Manchester Gardener

Hybrid sap, mosaic bark,
Twisted bloom and swollen seed,
Bright amid the sooty dark,
This gnarlèd gothic breed.
He sprouts so slyly, this plant in the greenery –
One of the forest and part of the scenery –
No felling him, this mimic of maple, primordial cousin:
Hack off a limb, and this pollarding hydra will shoot out a dozen.

Spawned in the blooms of his immigrant parents,
A cuckoo inherent, a mongrel ill-born.
Wrought in the heart of Enlightenment steam,
From a fever-soaked dream on a dew-sodden morn.
With roots in the clay and his head in Orion,
A vigorous scion, a devil-blest spawn,
A chance aberration, a found’ry mutation,
With lacewood of iron and baubles of thorn.

Invading our cities while shedding his skin,
This cryptic chimera has crept his way in.
And none of his caste have succumbed to senescence, as yet…
Elixir of ever-youth pumps his capillary,
Sweeter than gin from an alley distillery,
Alchemised out of pea-soupers and coal-dust and sweat.
As if he were built out of ratchets and springs,
His ethic for work will be written in rings –
He’s still in his galvanised prime, through the dry-times and wet.

What hath we wrought ?, and what hath we mined ?,
That ought to lie buried or trampled behind –
But workshops of soil are shooting out hordes of his kind.
And what if we find that he just keeps on growing ?,
And fruiting and sowing, till all is entwined ?
Hammered and forged in the mill and pipette –
Who knows how engorged this goliath may get ?

It is uncertain if the first accidental hybrid occured in Spain or in Vauxhall Gardens in London (well, technically in Surrey, but close enough). Interestingly, for all the streets lined with them, I don’t think there are any woods with them growing wild. Infact, it would be fascinating to deliberately plant a patch of wasteland with nothing but London Planes and see how well they self-seed. Yes, I realise that they’re not strictly British natives, but then they’re really native to nowhere.

So Says Sam Hain

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The Storyteller by ‘Dutch School’

So Says Sam Hain

Mischief Night, and the Devil is abroad –
He could be here.
For on this night, be you tenant or lord,
There’s something near.
Be it a ghost, or the ghost of a thought,
The underworld or the over-wrought,
It may be all, or it may be naught –
It’s getting dark, my dear.

Mischief Night, and the Devil is amock –
He could be nigh.
For on this night, as our worries flock,
His jinks run high.
A will-o’-the-wisp, or a whisp’ring breeze,
A chill in the air, or a banshee’s sneeze ?
A frost tonight or a deathly freeze ?
It’s getting cold – oh my…

Mischief Night, and the Devil is alive –
He could be me.
For on this night, the shenanigans thrive,
And fools run free.
Is that a ghoul, or a turnip’s head ?
A friendly fright, or the living dead ?
And the Devil just smiles and goes to bed –
It’s getting late, you see.

To the Future

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grandad to us all
Bronze effigy of Edward the 3rd in Westminster Abbey

To the Future

My world was taught in your history class,
In half a chapter your teacher rushed through.
Somewhen between a turning point
And some other event which we never knew.
My world just probably made you bored,
Learning the dates of a notable few –
But not of my name – I never was found
In the textbooks on which you scribbled and drew.

Maybe then I was nobody special,
Somebody whom you can safely ignore.
Never improved a million lives –
Never brought hatred, hunger, and war.
Maybe then I was nobody special,
Maybe achieved next to nothing at all.
But still I meant to a couple of dozen,
And for those the closest, an awful lot more.

You may then think that I was unknown,
Unrecorded in sadness and mirth.
Save for the parish’s register-book
Where my name’s still getting its three-entries’ worth.
Maybe you gotten my census or tax,
My causes of death and my weighing at birth.
But never be thinking that this is my lot,
All that I left from my time on this Earth.

Never get thinking that I didn’t count,
Or thinking I’m someone you never need.
For all that you laugh at my primitive ways,
Just never forget that we nobodies breed.
Even the famous had parents of unknowns,
As did all the riff-raff who helped them succeed.
So there must be hundreds, or thousands by your time,
In whose chain-genetics I mean much indeed.

It is claimed that anyone living in Britain today and whose family have been living here for several generations will lmost certainly be a direct descendent of King Edward the Third, who died in 1377.   Of course, if I’m, say, 24 generations down the line, that means I have over 830,000 great*21 grandparents, though quite a few of those will be dupliates.  Not that the poems about him, of course.

The Rigours of Indolence

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there's a storm brewing
The Ball on Shipboard by James Tissot

The Rigours of Indolence

Ah, those aristos, who never worked a day,
Just sit back and wait for Papa to pass away.
While armies of servants and hard-working-clarsses
Would feed their fat faces and wipe their fat arses,
And loans would be brokered to fund wars of nations,
While riches would pour in from ex-slave plantations.

Ah, those aristos, who feasted on our sweat,
Those patrons of the arts, that lavish social set –
With artists and craftsmen and tailors and tours,
And houses and horses and operas and balls.
They almost were worth it, their style could defend it –
They didn’t deserve it, but knew how to spend it.

Usually I resist any attempt to rhyme ‘class’ with ‘arse’, but this poem was written in with a definite accent in ear.  ‘Papa’ of course should be pronounced with its stress on the second syllable.  This is an early poem, but I’ve started to preach a little less and let a little satire slip in.  The title incidentally comes from a line in Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George the Third.

Sheep Mayn’t Safely Graze

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Photo by Nick Bondarev on Pexels.com

Sheep Mayn’t Safely Graze

We rack them out between bridges and nuts,
And crank till they must reply.
And those low, low throbs that we feel in our guts –
Well, the sheep feel them too, by-and-by.
But it’s never their bleats or their baas that are scored,
It’s never their voices that sing from each chord,
And it’s never their own requiem we applaud.
In life and in death, so their tension will always be high.

How many hundreds of thousands of sheep
Have our symphonies dispatched ?
Every cello has reason to weep,
And scream as its sinews are scratched.
How many flocks must we cull to the muse ?
How many sacrificed lambkins and ewes ?
On the altar of Bach shall their entrails ooze.
They live for this music, but always do strings come attached.

Mongers

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Playing Marbles and Rag & Bone Man by Steven Scholes

Mongers

We used to be just simple merchants –
Iron, fish, and cheese,
And jack-of-produce costermen –
The traders in the bare necessities.
But now we’re only spoken off
As rumour, scare, and war –
We’re jack-the-lads of shadowmen,
Now hawking abstract concepts door-to-door.

The Engineers’ Plot

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penge palace
Gems of The Crystal Palace, Sydenham by George Baxter, showing off the designs of Joseph Paxton

The Engineers’ Plot

Crystal Palace – it’s a suburb,
Station, park, and football team,
And a memory to a time
When this nation still could dream.
Once a product of Empire,
A palace to capture its roar –
Now just a flat-topped hill
In the Republic of Elsinore.
Straddling boroughs, pumping fountains,
Soaring towers, glass for miles.
Till flames across eight counties
Shattered her dreamy crystal aisles.

She no more beguiles – but that sounds Victorian –
Half vers libre, half Tudor sonnet.
Flirting with jazz and television,
Yet still bedecked in her bustle and bonnet.
She was no Bauhaus, no mere function –
Cast iron crockets encrusted her shell –
For all her prefab industry,
She always wore her baubles well.
Ah, she’s gone now – like her dinosaurs,
She’s of her time and place.
Though her place of course is the one she named –
You cannot say she leaves no trace.

Axis of Up

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unravelled

Axis of Up

Flatland always had all three,
All three dimensions on it –
Anyone with sense can see
The Flatoids are upon it !
It’s true, they barely used the zed,
But still the zed was there –
But as for other strings that thread,
These cannot cube the square.

Via Metallum

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mountain
Photo by Liam Gant on Pexels.com

Via Metallum

There is no metal in the metalled roads,
But still they’re made of steel –
They take the feet and hooves and loads,
And the ever-turning wheel.
The dust and ruts and highwaymen
Were swept away in dale and fen
By smooth and fast and tarmacked threads
With footed feet and watersheds.

But these have all been laid with stone
A century or more –
The job is done, the back is bone,
The soles are growing sore…
We surely now have roads enough
To leave the wilds unpaved and rough,
And only build our future trails
As metalled roads of shining rails.

Transatlantic Cable 14 – The Future

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maiden lane
View of Broadway, north from Cortlandt and Maiden Lane, 1885

<<< Previous Part

Transatlantic Cable 14 – The Future

I write you once again, my love,
By paper and by boat.
The old-fashioned way’s
The only way you’ll ever get my note.

But have you heard,
A telegraph now spans between we two ?
Is this the modern world, my love,
The endless chase for something new ?

Though sometimes, when I think how long
We take to send our hearts’ desires,
I fancy, on the breeze, that angels sing
Along those wires –

Pensmiths, calling pensmiths,
What you write today,
You’ll get to say tomorrow –
Calling pensmiths from across the globe,
Your words shall span and probe,
This time tomorrow.
We shall gladly carry all your distant precious words,
The small, the silly and absurd,
From off your lips to willing ears –
Allying fears that letters reach too slow –
Come tomorrow.

It’s hardly for the likes of us, my love,
Who must still write –
No spark or semaphore will speed
These words as fast as light.

I cannot see how just one simple cable
Can unite us all.
Messages are paper still and boats,
For those whose means are small.

And yet, so many weeks until
Your next reply can stoke my fires,
If only, on the breeze the angels sang
Along the wires –

Scribers, calling scribers,
What you write today,
Shall fly away tomorrow –
Calling scribers from across the sea,
Your words are bounding free
This time tomorrow.
We shall gladly carry ev’ry distant precious thought,
The playful and the overwrought,
That bring their homes to foreign parts,
Assuring hearts that letters reach too slow –
Come tomorrow.

Musical AI version generated by Suno.com – find more of them over here.