Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, INVITATION TO A PAINTER: 1, by WILLIAM ALLINGHAM


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

INVITATION TO A PAINTER: 1, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Flee from london, good my walter! Boundless jail of bricks and gas
Last Line: Landscape-lords are left alone.
Alternate Author Name(s): Pollex, D.; Walker, Patricius
Subject(s): Colors; Exhibitions; Landscape; Paintings & Painters; World's Fairs; Expositions


Flee from London, good my Walter! boundless jail of bricks and gas,
Weary purgatorial flagstones, dreary parks of burnt-up grass,
Exhibitions, evening parties, dust and swelter, glare and crush,
Fashion's costly idle pomp, Mammon's furious race and rush;
Leave your hot tumultuous city for the breaker's rival roar,
Quit your small suburban garden for the rude hills by the shore,
Leagues of smoke for morning vapour lifted off a mountain-range,
Silk and lace for barefoot beauty, and for 'something new and strange'
All your towny wit and gossip. You shall both in field and fair,
Paddy's cunning and politeness with the Cockney ways compare,
Catch those lilts and old-world tunes the maidens at their needle sing,
Peep at dancers, from an outskirt of the blithe applausive ring,
See our petty Court of Justice, where the swearing's very strong,
See our little plain St. Peter's with its kneeling peasant throng;
Hear the brogue and Gaelic round you; sketch a hundred Irish scenes,
(Not mere whiskey and shillelagh)—wedding banquets, funeral keenes;
Rove at pleasure, noon or midnight; change a word with all you meet;
Ten times safer than in England, far less trammell'd in your feet.
Here, the only danger known
Is walking where the land's your own.
Landscape-lords are left alone.





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