Of all the gay places the world can afford,
by gentle and simple for pastime adored,
fine balls,
fine concerts,
fine buildings and springs,
fine walks and fine views,
and a thousand fine things,
not to mention the sweet situation and air,
what place, my dear mother,
with Bath can compare?
It's two hundred years since he got in his stride,
and cantered away with the new Bath kind.
His spondees and dactyls were quite a success,
several editions were called from the press.
The guidebook consisted of letters in rhyme
of the follies and fashions of Bath at the time.
I notice a quiver come over my pen,
as I think of the follies and fashions since then.
Proud city of Bath, with your crescents
and squares,
your hoary old abbey, your playbills and chairs,
plentiful chapels where preachers
would preach,
and a different doctrine expounded in each.
Your gallant assemblies where squires
took their daughters,
your medicinal springs where the wives took their waters,
terraces
trim and the comely young wenches cobbled
back streets with their privies and stenches.
How varied and human did Bath then appear,
as the roar of the aven rolled up from the
weir.
In those days,
no doubt,
there was not so much taste.
Now there's so much, it is all run to waste.
Working out methods of cutting down cost,
so that mouldings,
proportions and texture
are lost.
In a uniform nothingness,
this I first find,
is the terrible tech with its
pointed behind.
New houses are units, people are digits,
Bath has been planned into quarters
for midgets.
Official designs are aggressively neuter,
the Puritan work of an eyeless computer.
Goodbye to all Bath, we who loved you are sorry.