Islington by Paul Bewsher — Read

Here slow decay with creeping finger peels / The yellow plaster from the grimy walls, / Like leprous lichen, day by day which falls, / And, day by day, more rotting stone reveals! / Here are old mournful squares through which there steals / No cheerful music, or the heedless calls / Of laughing children; and the smoke, which crawls / Across the sky, the heavy silence seals!

Lean, blackened trees stretch up their withered boughs / Behind the rusty railings, prison-bound, / In vain they seek the summer sunlight's gold / In which their long-dead fathers used to drowse: / For pallid terraces lie far around, / In gloomy sadness ever growing old.