  Rank odours ride on every breeze; Skyward a hundred towers loom; And factories throb and workshops wheeze, And children pine in secret gloom. To squabbling birds the roofs declaim Their little tale of misery; And, smiling over murk and shame, A wild rose blows by Bermondsey. Where every traffic-thridden street Is ribboned o'er with shade and shine, And webbed with wire and choked with heat; Where smokes with fouler smokes entwine; And where, at evening, darkling lanes Fume with a sickly ribaldry— Above the squalors and the pains, A wild rose blows by Bermondsey. Somewhere beneath a nest of tiles My little garret window squats, Staring across the cruel miles, And wondering of kindlier spots. An organ, just across the way, Sobs out its ragtime melody; But in my heart it seems to play: A wild rose blows by Bermondsey! And dreams of happy morning hills And woodlands laced with greenest boughs Are mine to-day amid the ills Of Tooley Street and wharfside sloughs, Though Cherry Gardens reek and roar, And engines gasp their horrid glee; I mark their ugliness no more: A wild rose blows by Bermondsey. |
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