Classic Poem

While neighbouring cities waste the fleeting hours,
Careless of art and knowledge and the smile
Of every Muse, expanding Birmingham,
Illumed by intellect, as gay in wealth,
Commands her aye-accumulating walls
From month to month to climb the adjacent hills;
Creep on the circling plains, now here, now there,
Divergent — change the hedges, thickets, trees,
Upturned, disrooted, into mortared piles,
The streets elongate and the statelier square. . . .
Warned by the Muse, if Birmingham should draw,
In future years, from more congenial climes
Her massy ore, her labouring sons recall,
And sylvan Colebrook's winding vales restore
To beauty and to song, content to draw
From unpoetic scenes her rattling stores,
Massy and dun; if, thence supplied, she fail,
Britain, to glut thy rage commercial, see
Grim Wolverhampton lights her smouldering fires,
And Sheffield smoke-involved; dim where she stands
Circled by lofty mountains, which condense
Her dark and spiral wreaths to drizzling rains,
Frequent and sullied, as the neighbouring hills
Ope their deep veins and feed her caverned flames;
While to her dusky sister Ketley yields,
From her long-desolate and livid breast,
The ponderous metal. No aerial forms
On Sheffield's arid moor or Ketley's heath
E'er wove the floral crowns, or smiling stretched
The shelly sceptre; — there no poet roved
To catch bright inspirations. Blush, ah, blush,
Thou venal Genius of these outraged groves,
And thy apostate head with thy soiled wings
Veil! — who hast thus thy beauteous charge resigned
To habitants ill-suited; hast allowed
Their rattling forges and their hammers' din,
And hoarse, rude throats, to fright the gentle train,
Dryads and fair-haired Naiades; — the song,
Once loud as sweet, of the wild woodland choir
To silence; — disenchant the poet's spell,
And to a gloomy Erebus transform
The destined rival of Tempean vales.