In Competition No. 2448 you were invited to write a poem entitled ‘A Description of a City Shower’. The poet of rain is undoubtedly Hardy. His titles fairly drip with it — ‘A Wet August’, ‘A Drizzling Easter Morning’, ‘Rain on a Grave’ and, more to the point, ‘A Thunderstorm in Town’, which charmingly features a snatched kiss inside a hansom cab.
I can’t resist quoting the last three lines from Swift’s poem with our title:
Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,
Dead cats and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood.
I expected ‘a City shower’ to be interpreted by some as a mob of unpleasant stockbrokers, and so it was. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver belongs to Mary Holtby. Today, alas or hurrah, I am 79.
Down fell the Rain, descending, as it must,
Upon the Unjust and the blameless Just,
Though I, but newly come into the City,
Know not the one from t’other, more’s the Pity.
I passed a Palace which I understood
Was designated for the Great and Good,
But such a Ragtag Regiment appears
Methought the Shower to be a Rain of Tears,
And Heav’n, rejecting e’en the Great and Good,
Were minded to repeat the General Flood.
No Noah here, no faithful Servant found
To steer an Ark and reach substantial Ground?
Some seemed the Slaves of Lucre, some of Love,
Afloat without the Prospect of a Dove,
Destined to sink with all their Beasts in train,
And ne’er a Rainbow sequent to the Rain.
Mary Holtby
The City-dwellers weave and jostle past
Like early silent movies run too fast.
A drop is felt, as large as 50p.
Naked as woodlice, all begin to flee.
Museum curators suddenly take heart:
The people, after all, esteem their art.
Round every church door forms an eager scrum,
Seeking salvation; is Millennium come?
And now in stair-rods comes the slashing tide.
The fountains in the square look tame beside.
And for a while, a thing scarce comprehended,
The Gross Domestic Product is suspended.
Just when it seems commercial life is doomed,
It clears; and Brownian motion is resumed.
In short, to put the thing another way,
It rained a bit and then it went away.
Noel Petty
For huddled baccy fiends a shower’s no joke.
Lepered outside by unprotected walls,
Disconsolate already, they face squalls
Of hostile urban rain that damps their smoke.
Others — the bold fl
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