Music of the Thames

Symphony in Yellow

"An omnibus across the bridge
Crawls like a yellow butterfly,
And, here and there, a passer-by
Shows like a little restless midge.
Big barges full of yellow hay
Are moored against the shadowy wharf,
And like a yellow silken scarf,
The thick fog hangs along the quay.
The yellow leaves begin to fade
And flutter from the Temple elms,
And at my feet the pale green Thames
Lies like a rod of rippled jade."

Poems, 1881  Oscar Wilde

Claude Monet must have seen similar views across the Thames when he was staying at the Savoy Hotel in the autumn of 1899 and the winters of 1900 and 1901, but this view upriver towards the Houses of Parliament was seen from his fifth floor balcony, not from the Embankment.

"… the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry…" J.M. Whistler

 Charing Cross Bridge  Claude Monet, 1899, completed 1902

© National Museum of Cardiff, Wales

Monet and Whistler had met in Paris, where both exhibited impressionist paintings in the Salon des Refuses of 1863.  The much younger Wilde, just down from Oxford, met Whistler in London in 1881,  and fell under the influence of this artistic circle.  It was fashionable to give paintings musical names, hence his poem title "Symphony". 

Wilde's 'yellow butterfly' too is a reminder of Whistler's monogram on his Thames "Nocturne" series,   painted further upstream at Chelsea between 1866 and 1877.  Whistler called them his 'moonlights', until his patron Frederick Leyland suggested the poetical name 'Nocturne'.

Thames Nocturne, James McNeill Whistler, c. 1875

© Indianapolis Museum of Art

London river

London River

For John Minton

"The world ends at  the pier, the purple snake

of the river vanishing into sunset, though

somewhere beyond, locked like a secret, another

existence begins -- with laws of its own

and a brotherhood because of no other, begun

when the coast is shed in the wake like a skin.

But, tied to the riveted stakes of habit, barges

copper as souvenirs of Egypt, pull and return

with the tide on a backspring, lazily large

for a day at their moorings, with money to burn

in the pockets of dockers, or sailors living

a one-night week, the rest an endurance.

It depends on the night, for nothing is lasting --

neither profit nor pleasure, which flare up

like a fire and founder as damply at leisure
--and unless you were there and looked up
catching the spark in its diamond of laughter,
nothing would remain to witness it later.

For sailors and waterfronts like Chinese boxes
hide away in layers behind unsmiling secrets
and carry different faces on Sundays
and Mondays, their surfaces ambiguous as foxes,
who snarl at themselves in a pool when frightened,
afraid of the trick that might prove them a fool.

Life here, as its environs, is precarious--
a world built up like a matchstick warehouse,
a mixture of spices and sawdust, timber
and sacking, that grows dormant at sunset
or lights up at sunrise its debris of history,
but where never a stable perspective is lacking.

Poems   Alan John Ross (1922-2001)

Rotherhithe from Wapping,  John Minton

© Royal College of Art,  Photocredit Southampton City Art Gallery 

'A pleasant academical retreat...'

"Wednesday 6 April.   ... We then walked into the City, and then strolled about the Temple, which is a most agreeable place.   You quit all the hurry and bustle of the City in Fleet Street and the Strand, and all at once find yourself in a pleasant academical retreat.  You see good convenient buildings, handsome walks, you view the silver  Thames.  You are shaded by venerable trees.  Crows are cawing above your head.  Here and there you see a solitary bencher sauntering about.  This description I take from the Reverend Dr. Blair, who is now come to town.  To select all these circumstances shows a fine imagination."

Boswell's London Journal 1762-3  James Boswell

Thames Frost Fairs

"1788/89

With the temperature within the city of London recorded as 11 degrees below freezing as early as the 25th November, throughout December and January fairs were held on the ice in London from Putney Bridge to Rotherhithe, a greater area than previously recorded.  Various amusements included turnabouts, puppet-shows, bear-baiting and a travelling menagerie of animals.  On one booth a sign was was raised :
'This booth to let.  The present possessor of the property is Mr. J. Frost.  His affairs however not being on a permanent footing a dissolution or bankruptcy may soon be expected and the final settlement of the whole entrusted to Mr. Thaw'.

Printing presses were installed and from one came the following verse:
The silver Thames was frozen o'er
No difference 'twixt the stream and shore,
The like no Man had seen before
Except he lived in days of yore. "

Frosts, Freezes and Fairs  Ian Currie

Consummate cursing

"We seemed like knights of some old legend, sailing across some mystic lake into the unknown realm of twilight, unto the great land of the sunset.

We did not go into the realm of twilight; we went slap into that punt, where those three old men were fishing.  We did not know what had happened at first, because the sail shut out the view,  but from the nature of the language, that rose up on the evening air, we gathered that we had come into the neighbourhood of human beings, and that they were vexed and discontented.

Harris let the sail down, and then we saw what had happened.  We had knocked those three old gentlemen off their chairs into a general heap at the bottom of the boat, and they were now slowly and painfully sorting themselves out from each other, and picking fish off themselves; and as they worked, they cursed us -- not with a common cursory curse, but with long, carefully-thought-out, comprehensive curses, that embraced the whole of our career, and went away into the distant future, and included all our relations, and covered everything connected with us - good, substantial curses.

Harris told them they ought to be grateful for a little excitement, sitting there fishing all day, and he also said that he was shocked and grieved to hear men their age give way to temper so.

But it did not do any good."

Three Men in a Boat  Jerome K. Jerome

turning of pages

"... the quiet of an age-old river is like the slow turning of pages in a well-loved book."

Till I End My Song  Robert Gibbings

January's Great Frost

"Jan. 4, 1709:- ...  My ink has been fros, and tho I writ with it as it comes boiling from the fire, it's white.  If I might tell you all the stories are daily brought in of accidents accationed by the great frost I might fill sheets, as children drown upon the Thames, post-boys being brought in by their horses to their stages frose to their horses stone dead, and we are obliged to the horses for having our letters regular.  There are several stories trump'd up that happened the last great frost of 1684 and told as now; they begin to build booths upon the Thames, it begins a little to thaw, so I hope it will not last so long as that did... "

The Wentworth Papers   Peter Wentworth to his brother, Lord Raby.

The Doves Press

" 'Consecratio quae offertur ab homine non redimetur nec vendetur sed morte morietur'.

To the bed of the River Thames, the River on whose banks I have printed all my printed Books, I, THE DOVES PRESS bequeath The Doves Press fount of Type, -- the punches, matrices, and type in use at The Doves Press at the time of my death.  And may the River, in its tides and flow, pass over them to and from the great sea for ever and ever, or until its tides and flow for ever cease; then may they share the fates of all the worlds and pass from change to change for ever upon the Tides of Time untouched of other use."

Catalogue Raisonne, printed in 1916 by T.J. Cobden Sanderson of The Doves Press.