`Bring out your dead` rang out the cry
As creaking tumbrils passed on by.
The minders with their prodding poles
Worked steadily at their task, the ghouls.
The doors daubed with a grisly cross
Showed houses with at least one loss
If no answer came to their knocking
On entry in might prove quite shocking
All the inmates in had died
There was no one still there left alive.
In the year of our Lord 1665.
Those picture-postcard houses stood
Of timber frame and lath and wood
Overhanging, blotting out the sky
Hazardous to passers by
As rubbish, urine, filth and muck
On their way they`d have to duck.
Ankle deep the filthy street
At the back the cess-pits reeked.
Rats grew big and fat and brown
As dogs and cats had been put down
They chance were carriers of the ills
So rats escaped to roam free will.
The corpses and their crawling maggots
Were buried in great pits like faggots
No room for laying down in lines
Stacked together for all time.
Out of this miasma, pain,
London lived to thrive again.
The great fire of 1666
Cleansed the place, proved the great fix.
Please tell me what you think
Comments
1 - 6 of 6
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choice words here, well presented! i enjoyed reading this poem very much and am inspired by it…
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A most interesting poem. The picture described is probably quite accurate. London in the 17th century was not a place for those of tender sensibilities. A bit like the moral state of Washington DC really.
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Cleansing is good. So is this poem.
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awh! I hear the wooden wheels roll over the stones with bodies piled high on them. The rats and their fleas were the cause of course. But no one knew. Sad.This matches what I've watched on the history channel recently. Did you know. Some who suffered and died were forced into tunnels beneath Edinbourgh streets to die there? Tragic thing.And documented as haunted.
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Ewwww, I studied this part of English history and it made me mauseous. Thanks for the reliving of history. It was in 1665 huh?
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I am sorry to hear your'e mauseous. What does that mean? Is it a cross between murine and nauseating?
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