Read "London Roses" by Willa Cather online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
"Rowses, Rowses! Penny a bunch! " they tell you -- / Slattern girls in Trafalgar, eager to sell you. / Roses, roses, red in the Kensington sun, / Holland Road, High Street, Bayswater, see you and smell you -- / Roses of London town, red till the summer is done.
Roses, roses, locust and lilac, perfuming / West End, East End, wondrously budding and blooming / Out of the black earth, rubbed in a million hands, / Foot-trod, sweat-sour over and under, entombing / Highways of darkness, deep gutted with iron bands.
"Rowses, rowses! Penny a bunch! " they tell you, / Ruddy blooms of corruption, see you and smell you, / Born of stale earth, fallowed with squalor and tears -- / North shire, south shire, none are like these, I tell you, / Roses of London perfumed with a thousand years.