Themed London Walks

Poetry in Motion Part 2: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

The Waste Land is the most famous English poem of the 20^th century, but also the one most likely to scare readers away.

For this, T.S. Eliot himself is to blame. The notes he published alongside the poem – mainly to “pad out” what would otherwise have been an even slighter book – appear to tell the reader: Sorry, old chap, but if you cannot read German, Italian or Sanskrit in the original and if you are not familiar with medieval imagery or Ovid, then this is not for you, so you may now return to your comic books, birdbrain.

Actually, and Eliot came close to admitting that himself much later in his life, the notes are a bit of a red herring. They certainly appear to make the poem coherent, but many educated readers – who are far more competent than me to pass judgment in these matters – agree that incoherence is very much woven into The Waste Land’s fabric.

The poem, they argue, actually wants you to feel clueless and aghast, perhaps even a little frightened – talking in different voices, some of which are trying to tell you a story, while others are making an argument or even shout at you, often at the same time and interrupting each other. (Not a bad metaphor for the experience of urban life, at any rate.)

What is clear is that one of the voices in which Eliot has written his poem appears to take you on a guided walk through the City of London. This is the voice we are going to concentrate on today, ignoring all the others and leaving them for the literary critics.

London, more precisely the City of London, the town’s financial district, puts in its first appearance in the last paragraph of Part 1.

 Unreal City,

 Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

  A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

  I had not thought death had undone so many.

This is a strangely hostile phrase considering that Eliot himself would have been one of those “Zombie” commuters that he describes on their way to work.

After all, Eliot himself was such a foot soldier in the City of London: not for a summer job, not for a brief interlude between two jobs in academia or publishing, but for eight long years. Eight years! Five days a week from nine thirty to six and every other Saturday until lunch, he sat at the foreign desk of Lloyd’s Bank, two floors down in the basement of the building, converting currencies from and into Sterling.

The other drones at the bank valued him as a respectable, if perhaps a trifle unambitious colleague with a strange and nerdish hobby. (Imagine your surprise if your colleague – the one who makes matchstick models of the Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal – were suddenly to win the Turner Prize!)

So London Bridge is where we start, crossing the Thames northbound into King Willam Street and walking across Lower Thames Street on the overpass.

O City City, I can sometimes hear

Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,

The pleasant whining of a mandoline

And a clatter and a chatter from within

Where fishermen lounge at noon: where the walls

Of Magnus Martyr hold

Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold

Magnus the Martyr is the church you see on the street’s right hand side – you will have to walk down and enter to judge whether the Ionian white and gold is really so inexplicable, considering that this is a church after all.

And do not expect to hear too many “pleasant whinings” down Lower Thames Street on your way: even if there were any mandolines left, they would be drowned out by the much less pleasant roar of the lorry traffic. (And the last fisherman probably lounged here sometime in the era of Charles Dickens.)

At the next big intersection, Cannon Street veers off to the left.

Unreal City

Under the brown fog of a winter noon

Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant

Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants

C.i.f. London: documents at sight,

Asked me in demotic French

To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel

Followed by a wee at the Metropole

Mr Eugenides appears to have rather taken a shine on the person behind this particular voice, bearing in mind that the Metropole was a grand and expensive hotel in the slightly unsalubrious seaside resort of Brighton.

The hotel still exists, unlike the Cannon Street Hotel which was bombed, together with the train station to which it had been attached, in WWII and, unlike the train station, never rebuilt.

Which is why we shall not bother with Cannon Street any further, turning instead less sharply to the left, “north-north-west”, continuing down King William Street: where Mr Eliot’s “London guided walk” voice had wanted us to go all along, in that final paragraph of Part 1.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

St Mary Woolnoth is the church on the corner with Lombard Street, on your right hand side just before you reach the large public square opposite the Bank of England.

On this square, turn right into Cornhill: we are now approaching the place where much of this post’s subject was concocted, and there it is, just on the right hand side of the large equestrian statue.

17 Cornhill was the address of the Colonial and Foreign Department at Lloyd’s Bank, where Eliot worked until 1920 when he moved to the bank’s head office at 71 Lombard Street around the corner. (On his way to work, he apparently  loved to take a shortcut from St Mary Woolnoth through a narrow passage called Pope’s Head Alley which still exists.)

We could end our walk here, but to really do justice to the subject of London and The Waste Land, we shall have to return to the river Thames which plays such an important part in the poem. All of the bleakness of urban life is here:       

The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf

Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind

Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.

The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends

Or other testimony of summer night. The nymphs are departed.

And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;

Departed, have left no addresses.

To follow the flow of the poem further, we would have to turn east:             

The river sweats

Oil and tar

The barges drift  

 With the turning tide

  Red sails

  Wide

  To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.

  The barges wash

  Drifting logs

  Down Greenwich reach

  Past the Isle of Dogs 

Following which Richmond and Kew also receive name-checks – which means that, finally, we have to abandon any plan that we might have had to follow on our own two feet the trail of Mr. Eliot’s imagination.

From Greenwich to Richmond, that’s a good 15 miles by the banks of the river, which means that you would have to leave early just to be there before dusk. Never mind the question of what you may expect from recreating the experience of raising your knees “supine on the floor of a narrow canoe”.

Better instead to return to London Bridge, for the poem’s final flourish:

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Inevitably, if you think about it, all things considered. The rest, as they say, is all

                  Shantih shantih shantih …

Read Poetry in Motion part 1 of our themed London Walk here.

Did you enjoy the Poetry in Motion part 2 of our themed walks? Then, don’t miss more of the same by following us on Facebook or getting our free updates via email.

Read the original post and more of the same at easy hiker

Themed London Walks

Poetry in Motion

Literature and (easy) hiking have always gone together well. As a way of exploring nature, for one. Nature, after all, has provided a source of inspiration for poets since the dawn of literature.

But for many, I suspect, the more important thing has been the act of walking as such: new experiences and impressions slowly sinking in, set to the background patter of one’s own movement, the tic-toc of walking feet, providing a powerful inducement to rhyme and rhythm.

This relationship can, of course, be inversed, too. Walking is a great way of making, but also of appreciating literature. So for today’s walk, we shall string together a few major sights and side streets of West London into a Poetry Walk through the heart of the British capital.

We start in Kensington Gardens, which is where Matthew Arnold claims to have written these lines.

Birds here make song, each bird has his,
Across the girdling city’s hum.
How green under the boughs it is!
How thick the tremulous sheep-cries come!

Sometimes a child will cross the glade
To take his nurse his broken toy;
Sometimes a thrush flit overhead
Deep in her unknown day’s employ.

Here at my feet what wonders pass,
What endless, active life is here!
What blowing daisies, fragrant grass!
An air-stirr’d forest, fresh and clear.

Not much change there, one might say, in 150 years, apart from the fact that the tremulous sheep-cries have since made way for something less pastoral – in most cases, something involving groups of teenagers – while the overhead thrush is nowadays more likely to be the 2.15 from Singapore, circling the skies while waiting for landing permission at Heathrow. But you get the drift.

Now this would not be Matthew “Dover Beach” Arnold if he left it at some quaint observations in the municipal park without involving God, man’s yearning for love or the impossibility of actually achieving it.

Calm soul of all things! make it mine
To feel, amid the city’s jar,
That there abides a peace of thine,
Man did not make, and cannot mar.

The will to neither strive nor cry,
The power to feel with others give!
Calm, calm me more! nor let me die
Before I have begun to live.

We leave Kensington Gardens in a northeasterly direction, towards Regent Park, but turning right into Devonshire Street just before we reach it. This is a street of hospitals, like the more famous Harley Street around the corner.

This is important to know to understand John Betjeman’s poem which  carries the street’s name. After the atmosphere has been set – featuring Edwardian faience, wrought iron screens and a heavy mahogany door – the poem suddenly goes into close-up: 

No hope. And the X-ray photographs under his arm
Confirm the message.

A man has been told that he will die, soon, and, it seems, under specifically unpleasant circumstances. Understandably, he feels more than a little sorry for himself.

No hope. And the iron knob of this palisade
So cold to the touch, is luckier now than he
“Oh merciless, hurrying Londoners! Why was I made
For the long and painful deathbed coming to me?”

But then, his wife, who has so far stood “timidly by”, takes center stage, and Betjeman proves that he is more than the whimsical “bard of suburbia” for whom he is often mistaken.

She puts her fingers in his, as, loving and silly
At long-past Kensington dances she used to do
“It’s cheaper to take the tube to Piccadilly
And then we can catch a nineteen or twenty-two”.

(The building on the photo, incidentally, standing in for Betjeman’s private clinic, is the HQ of the National Philatelic Society. None of the actual hospitals in the contemporary Devonshire Street appeared to fit the description as well.)

We continue around the corner for a strikingly similar theme – death and the indifference of urban life to it – and turn right into Wimpole Street, searching for the building at no. 67, which is the subject of this poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street …

This is where Arthur Henry Hallam lived, son of the royal historian Henry Hallam (who was sufficiently well known to make it on to the plaque that adorns the front of the building) and Tennyson’s best friend when he died, aged 22, on a trip to the continent. Tennyson took 18 years to finish the 133 cantos of In Memoriam, an epic outpouring of grief, of which the following is a part (as Canto 7).

… doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,—
A hand that can be clasped no more,—
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.
He is not here ; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly through the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

(On a totally different note, at no. 57 Wimpole Street, just a few houses down the road, Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote I Want To Hold Your Hand. Just thought I’d mention that.)

Turn right into Regent Street and continue down to Trafalgar Square for some well-earned light relief, provided by the reliably upbeat William McGonagall, who is generally known as the worst poet in British history. This is what the Swan of Dundee has to say on the subject of Nelson’s Column.

And as for Nelson’s Monument that stands in Trafalgar Square,
It is a most stately monument I most solemnly declare,
And towering defiantly very high,
Which arrests strangers’ attention while passing by.

Then there’s two beautiful water-fountains spouting up very high,
Where the weary travellers can drink when he feels dry;
And at the foot of the monument there’s three bronze lions in grand array,
Enough to make the stranger’s heart throb with dismay.

Dismayed, we are now crossing the Strand and continue down to the Thames.

The river, slipping between
Lamps, is rayed with golden bands 

D.H. Lawrence is mainly famous for his novels (nude wrestling, gamekeepers and all that), but he also wrote hundreds of poems including some about London including this one called Embankment Bridge. At the time (just before WWI), the bridge – on your right hand side – appeared to be the place where the city’s “outcasts” drifted at night: the word with which the poem starts. Lawrence then continues:

Beasts that sleep will cover
Their faces in their flank; so these
Have huddled rags or limbs on the naked sleep.

In the 1980s, the drifters and homeless set up their village a little further downstream underneath Waterloo Bridge, but nowadays, you can see them almost anywhere across the West End. What has not changed is the proximity of extreme poverty to some of the capital’s fanciest parts, specifically its theatres – nor has the seeming indifference of the wealthy to the destitution in their midst.

On the outer pavement, slowly,
Theatre people pass,
Holding aloft their umbrellas that flash and are bright
Like flowers of infernal moly
Over nocturnal grass
Wetly bobbing and drifting away on our sight.

This specific stretch of the Thames also gets a name-check in Rudyard Kipling’s The River’s Tale, in which the Thames – in its own “voice” – gives an account of the prehistory of London right up to the times “when the Romans left / and the Danes blew in / and your history books begin”.

And I remember like yesterday
The earliest Cockney who came my way,
When he pushed through the forest that lined the Strand,
With paint on his face and a club in his hand.

We turn underneath Embankment Bridge towards the Houses of Parliament – but while we are in the right place for the Impression du Matin by Oscar Wilde, we may not be there at the right time. Let’s use our imagination and pretend it’s the hour right before dawn.

The Thames nocturne of blue and gold
Changed to a Harmony in gray:
A barge with ochre-colored hay
Dropt from the wharf: and chill and cold

The yellow fog came creeping down
The bridges, till the houses’ walls
Seemed changed to shadows, and St. Paul’s
Loomed like a bubble o’er the town.

Then suddenly arose the clang
Of waking life; the streets were stirred
With country waggons: and a bird
Flew to the glistening roofs and sang.

But one pale woman all alone,
The daylight kissing her wan hair,
Loitered beneath the gas lamp’s flare,
With lips of flame and heart of stone.

And finally – remember: it’s early in the morning – we can now climb Westminster Bridge for Wordsworth’s ode to this city: the most famous of all poems about London or indeed any great city in the world.

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Experience some poetry in motion. Take a walk or an easy hike. Part 2 follows.

We are preparing more themed walks. Make sure not to miss them by following us on Facebook or subscribing to our free updates via email.

Read the original post and more of the same at easy hiker

Holidays in the Netherlands

Biking or Hiking

At the end of our visit to the Netherlands, I finally had to concede defeat. We were leaving the country in the sad realization that the Dutch will never take to hiking in a major way. Never will hiking be the preferred choice of the Dutch for moving about their cities or their countryside: for the simple reason that the big beast which hiking would – to use the terms of Sir Alex Ferguson – have to “knock off its effing perch” is simply too big. No….

The Dutch will never get off their bicycles.

Exhibit one: cycling lanes are everywhere – which does not mean that the Dutch do not insist on taking bicycles to places where they clearly do not belong …

… or where they seem somewhat out of their element.

Even when they go hiking, the Dutch go biking first – as we found out on our walk in Kralingse Bos …

… where virtually anywhere you go, people on two wheels outnumber people on two feet.

Two feet good, two wheels better – that seems to be the unofficial motto of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (what would that be in Latin?).

Particularly so when you approach anything with young people in it – such as Utrecht University.

Now, to the cursory observer it might seem that bicycles have taken over the country and are running it in their own interest. The actual truth, however, as we found out, is much sadder….

Bicycles are born free, but everywhere, they are in chains.

… or worse…

Bicycles of the Netherlands, unite!

Check out what else we were up to in the Netherlands on our recent visit there.

Enjoyed this post? Why not subscribe to our free updates via email or follow us on Facebook?

Read the original post and more of the same at easy hiker

Walks in the Netherlands

And now, for something completely different.

A Vertical Hike in Utrecht

Part three in our short series of “Walks in the Netherlands” provides a stark contrast both to the forested lake and windmills of Kralingen and to our delightful urban promenade along the canals of Utrecht. In the first two walks, you have seen an exemplary Dutch landscape and an exemplary Dutch townscape. Today’s walk offers neither. In fact, the view for most of the walk looks rather like this.

If you now say: this looks like the view from inside a walled staircase, you are very nearly there. Because today, we are going to climb up the tower of Utrecht Cathedral.

This is the shortest walk our site has ever featured, with a distance from the top to the ground of about 110 metres, and our very first nearly vertical “hike”. Because from the street level, the only way is up, straight all the way, for 465 steps.

This is actually far less grim than it sounds, mainly because you are not made to take it all in one go. You can only walk up the tower as part of a guided tour (at a cost of € 8 per person), and the guide stops at different levels to explain a few things about the history of the building, also allowing you to catch your breath.

From the level of the first stop, you are already overlooking most of the buildings of Utrecht’s near-by Old Town. This is the part of the tower that the medieval bishops used as a sort of second home, at times – when things got a little sticky – a fortified retreat.

Later the church warden moved in to live here. At 20 meters above ground, this was highest home in all of the medieval Netherlands. You will see that the floors all have trap doors set into them: these were built in to haul up food – and drink, as the case may be.

The 16^th century Dutch, it turned out, were not as strictly Puritan as they might have wanted each other to believe, at least some of them were not, and one warden was fired after it was found out that he had turned his upper-level flat into what must have been the medieval predecessor of a modern roof-top cocktail bar.

The cathedral tower was constructed in the 14^th century when it was one of the tallest buildings in Europe. The church attached to it was never fully finished, and when much of its middle section collapsed in 1674 (during a violent storm), the gaping holes in the nave were simply bricked up, and the tower was left to stand alone. This is what the Cathedral still looks like today.

The belfry marks the half-way stage of the climb. The oldest bells here date from the early 16^th century, and the total set weighs over 30 tons – with the biggest bell alone accounting for 8000 kg.

From here onwards of our vertical hike in Utrecht, the stairway becomes very narrow and slippery, too, since it is partly exposed to the elements. It is quite clear that the clergymen of the medieval diocese and not even the church wardens climbed this stairway as a matter of their daily routine.

It seems that on a clear day, you can – we obviously had to take our guide’s word for it – see the steeples of the neighbouring towns and even Amsterdam from the top viewing platform.

Made it Ma! Top of the Netherlands.

Or not, as the case may be. I actually looked this up – and was a little disappointed to find out that this famously flat country’s highest “mountain” clocks in at a surprisingly respectable 322 m. This is the Vaalserberg right at the Dutch frontier with Belgium and Germany, which doubled up – for about a hundred years in the 19^th century – as one of the rarest things on earth, a veritable quadripoint.

That sounds like a great destination for another walk. We shall certainly come back to Holland at some point in the future.

Let us tell you where to go for a short hike or a pleasant walk wherever you may be on a holiday. Follow us on Facebook or get our free updates via email.

We thank the Utrecht Tourism Board for allowing us to discover their pleasant city as their guests. However, all the opinions expressed in our posts are our own, genuine and heartfelt.

Read the original post and more of the same at easy hiker

Walks in the Netherlands

 A Pleasant Urban Promenade

The modern world was born in the Netherlands: this small country at the edge of Europe, forever at risk of sliding into the Atlantic Ocean, was the first that was run for and on behalf of its citizens. Today, we take this form of government for granted: is there any other?

But this “by the people, for the people” principle was much less obvious in the 17^th century when nearly all countries in Europe were subject to the whims of their feudal overlords, no matter how outrageous – or brutal.

Amsterdam was the town where this historical sea change occurred, but the country had a history before Rembrandt and Spinoza, and much of it was connected with the city of Utrecht – where the Dutch archbishop was domiciled and where many of the country’s top clergymen had their residences (including Pope Hadrian VI, the last non-Italian in the fisherman’s shoes for 450 years).

Yet at the same time, Utrecht was also the place where the blueprint for the country’s Golden Age was designed.

The story of Utrecht is the story of the church. For centuries, Utrecht was, and in many ways still is (at least for the country’s Catholic community), the religious capital of the Netherlands.

But it is also the story of its canal network, constructed and extended from the early Middle Ages onwards to connect the town centre with the river Rhine and other parts of the Netherlands.

It was this network that gave rise to an independent merchant class, and when they became wealthy and confident enough to assert their rights against the clergy, Utrecht, Holland and the entire western world were never to be the same again.

Our interest in Utrecht’s canal network is nevertheless focused on something else: never mind its great historical interest (an application for inclusion on the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites has been filed).

The city’s waterway system also makes for a highly pleasant urban promenade.

We begin our walk on Willemsplantsoen opposite the national HQ of the Dutch Railway Company where a UFO appears to have just landed on the roof …

… (at the risk of disappointing some of you: it is only a sculpture, made by the Dutch artist Marc Ruygrok) and continue southwards past the historic buildings of the Karel V luxury hotel on our left until we meet the canal.

On your left hand side, you can see some buildings in the southern part of the Old Town, which is specifically packed with church buildings and the remnants of medieval monasteries.

This stretch of the canal footpath runs alongside a – now dead – side arm of the waterway system, which is particularly peaceful.

On Tolsteegbruck, we cross the Oude Gracht, ancient Utrecht’s “main street”. The city’s Old Town now lies to your left on this pleasant urban promenade.

We continue straight, past the back of the University Museum on our left. (Utrecht is home to the country’s largest university and accommodates 30,000 students) and across Absteder Bridge …

… with Nieuwe Gracht on our left hand side. This canal is one of the most recent additions to the network and is only half as wide as the two-lane highway of the “Old Canal”.

Nieuwe Gracht

Continue past the municipal Stads Schouwburg theatre and follow the canal to the left. This is where the footpath next to the canal – and therefore the walk – ends, but there is one last thing we still have to do.

Follow the canal – down its oldest stretch: parts of this section go back nearly 1000 years – and just after it makes another left turn, near the bridge called Zandbrug, you can find Utrecht’s most visited statue.

Let me guess: you have no idea who or what this is. If you do, you are most probably from the Far East, where Miffy appears to be much more popular than in Europe or even his native Holland (where, incidentally, he is known as Nijntje. Go on, you try to make the Japanese pronounce that.)

Miffy is the brainchild of the artist Dick Bruna, a son and long-time resident of Utrecht – and if you want to see more of either, you can visit the Dick Bruna House, Utrecht’s newest museum (est. in 2006), opposite the town’s Central Museum.

The bad news is that the Dick Bruna House is located on the other end of the city centre – so for you, this walk has just started.

Where to eat in Utrecht after that pleasant urban promenade you just did.

We thank the Utrecht Tourism Board for allowing us to discover their pleasant city as their guests. However, all the opinions expressed in our posts are our own, genuine and heartfelt.

Read the original post and more of the same at easy hiker