This Ethel Carnie poem is from her 1911 collection Songs of a Factory Girl. She was a working-class writer from Lancashire who began working at cotton mills aged 11. She edited an anti-fascist journal, The Clear Light and her poems were published in the Freedom paper, where she took up the cause of Anarchists imprisoned in Soviet jails.
She lived 1 January 1886 – December 1962 and was the first working-class woman to publish a novel.
London
Dearer than woods, bursting to new, bright green,
Where whistling blackbirds shrill ‘mid rose-starred briars;
Trails of white-petalled strawberries, April-washed,
Are these grey streets, vast crowds, and silvery spires:
Wide lawns of fair loveliness, where Dawn
Trips, leaving diamond traces of her feet:
And bramble bushes hung with gossamers
Wake not within my heart a thrill so sweet
As when surrounded by this mighty throng,
These varying streams of great humanity,
Bearing their little toll of flowers or weeds
To the vast ocean of Eternity.
List to this murmur that doth rise and fall
Like surge of billows – richer than the notes
Of blackbird, or the cuckoos madrigal,
Or rapturous joy of bursting linnet-throats!
The lady’s cultured accents, the hoarse call
Of violet-sellers help to swell that sound;
The child’s thin treble and the beggar’s drone,
Make up the song that floods the air around.
Dear, busy hive of warm and throbbing life,
O! what are bees and birds, and chainless sea,
Compared with men and women? These do make
The charm that draws one evermore to thee.
Ethel Carnie
standupandspit 