City Poems

Table of Contents

1. In the Crowd

   by Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts

   
   

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   I walk the city square with thee.
   The night is loud; the pavements roar.
   Their eddying mirth and misery
   Encircle thee and me.
   

   The street is full of lights and cries.
   The crowd but brings thee close to me.
   I only hear thy low replies;
   I only see thine eyes.
   

2. A Busy Street

   by Annette Wynne

   All up and down the busy street
   The people pass with eager feet—
   They must have pleasant things to do
   They hurry so the long day through.
   

   All day long they pass me by;
   They must have better things than I
   At home or where they want to go—
   And that is why they hurry so.
   

3. Night in a Down-town Street

   by Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts

   
   

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   Not in the eyed, expectant gloom,
   Where soaring peaks repose
   And incommunicable space
   Companions with the snows;
   

   Not in the glimmering dusk that crawls
   Upon the clouded sea,
   Where bourneless wave on bourneless wave
   Complains continually;
   

   Not in the palpable dark of woods
   Where groping hands clutch fear,
   Does Night her deeps of solitude
   Reveal unveiled as here.
   

   The street is a grim canon carved
   In the eternal stone,
   That knows no more the rushing stream
   It anciently has known.
   

   The emptying tide of life has drained
   The iron channel dry.
   Strange winds from the forgotten day
   Draw down, and dream, and sigh.
   

   The narrow heaven, the desolate moon
   Made wan with endless years,
   Seem less immeasurably remote
   Than laughter, love, or tears.
   

4. Portland

   by Elijah Kellogg

   
   

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   Still may I love, beloved of thee,
   My own fair city of the sea!
   Where moulders back to kindred dust
   The mother who my childhood nurst,
   And strove, with ill-requited toil,
   To till a rough, ungrateful soil;
   Yet kindly spired by Heaven to know
   That Faith's reward is sure, though slow,
   And see the prophet's mantle grace
   The rudest scion of her race.
   

   And while around thy seaward shore
   The Atlantic doth its surges pour,
   (Those verdant isles, thy bosom-gems,)
   May Temples be thy diadems;
   Spire after spire in beauty rise,
   Still pointing upward to the skies
   Unwritten sermons, and rebukes of love,
   To point thy toiling throngs to worlds above.
   

5. Postmen

   by Annette Wynne

   Some postmen sit inside all day,
   Giving lovely things away,
   Packages and bundles tied
   With the best of things inside,
   And letters, too, all clean and white
   They hand to you with great delight;
   They like to sit there all the day
   And give the pleasant things away.
   But other postmen walk outside
   Along the city far and wide;
   They take the bundles that they give
   And letters, too, out where you live;
   They do not mind the walk at all,
   They're pretty strong, and glad and tall;
   Such pleasant things some people do,
   They must be happy all day through.
   

6. Genoa

   by William Gibson

   Gently, as roses die, the day declines;
   On the charmed air there is a hush the while;
   And delicate are the twilight-tints that smile
   Upon the summits of the Apennines.
   The moon is up; and o'er the warm wave shines
   A faery bridge of light, whose beams beguile
   The fancy to some far and fortunate isle,
   Which love in solitude unlonely shrines.
   The blue night of Italian summer glooms
   Around us; over the crystalline swell
   I gaze on Genoa's spires and palace-domes:
   City of cities, the superb, farewell!
   The beautiful, in nature's bloom, is thine;
   And Art hath made it deathless and divine!
   

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