MUCH tolerance and genial strength of mind
Unbiassed witnesses who wish to find
This railway-station possible at all
Must cheerfully expend. Artistical
Ideas wither here: a magic power
Alone can pardon and in pity dower
With fictive charm a structure so immane.
How then may fancy, to begin with, feign
An origin for such a roundabout
Approach — so intricate, yet so without
Intention, and so spanned by tenebrous
And thundering viaducts? Grotesquely, thus: —
One night the disposition of the ward
Was shifted; for the streets with one accord,
Enfranchised by a landslip, danced the hay
And innocently jumbled up the way.
And so we enter. Here, without perhaps,
Except the automatic money-traps.
Inside the station, everything's so old,
So inconvenient, of such manifold
Perplexity, and, as a mole might see,
So strictly what a station shouldn't be.
That no idea minifies its crude
And yet elaborate ineptitude.
But some such fancied cataclysmal birth: —
Out of the nombles of the martyred earth
This old, unhappy terminus was hurled
Back from a day of small things when the world
At twenty miles an hour still stood aghast.
And thought the penny post mutation vast
As change itself. Before the Atlantic race
Developed turbined speed; before life's pace
Was set by automobilism; before
The furthest stars came thundering at the door
To claim close kindred with the sons of men;
Before the lettered keys outsped the pen;
Ere poverty was deemed the only crime
Or wireless news annihilated time,
Divulged now by an earthquake in the night,
This ancient terminus first saw the light.
A natural magic having gravely made
This desperate station possible, delayed
No longer by its character uncouth,
The innocent adventurer, seeking truth
Imaginative, if it may be, plays
His vision, penetrant as chemic rays,
Upon the delta wide of platforms, whence
Discharges into London's sea, immense
And turbulent, a brimming human flood,
A river inexhaustible of blood
That turns the wheels, and by a secret, old
As labour, changes heart-beats into gold
For those that toil not; all the gutters run.
Houses are daubed, with it; and moon and sun
Splashed as they spin. And yet this human tide,
As callous as the glaciers that glide
A foot a day, but as a torrent swift.
Sweeps unobservant save of time — for thrift
Or dread disposes clockwards every glance —
Right through a station which a seismic dance
Chimerical alone can harmonize
Even in imagination's friendly eyes.
Clearly a brimming tide of mind as well
As blood, whose ebb and flow is buy and sell,
Engulfed by London's storm and stress of trade
Before it reached the civic sea, and made
Oblivious, knowing nought terrestrial
Except that time is money, and money all.
[Extract]
Poetry Atlas has many other poems about railway stations, including Davidson's poems about other London stations.