After The Fair

The singers are gone from the Cornmarket-place      With their broadsheets of rhymes,     The street rings no longer in treble and bass      With their skits on the times,     And the Cross, lately thronged, is a dim naked space      That but echoes the stammering chimes.     From Clock-corner steps, as each quarter ding-dongs,      Away the folk roam     By the "Hart" and Grey's Bridge into byways and "drongs,"      Or across the ridged loam;     The younger ones shrilling the lately heard songs,      The old saying, "Would we were home."     The shy-seeming maiden so mute in the fair      Now rattles and talks,     And that one who looked the most swaggering there      Grows sad as she walks,     And she who seemed eaten by cankering care      In statuesque sturdiness stalks.     And midnight clears High Street of all but the ghosts      Of its buried burghees,     From the latest far back to those old Roman hosts      Whose remains one yet sees,     Who loved, laughed, and fought, hailed their friends, drank their toasts      At their meeting-times here, just as these!     1902.