George Rawlins
Grub Street Parties
This poem is from the forthcoming book Cheapside Afterlife (April 2021, Longleaf Press at Methodist University). The book reimagines in 57 sonnets the life of the 18th-century poet Thomas Chatterton. At age 16, Chatterton invented the imaginary persona of a 15th-century poet he named Thomas Rowley and tried to pass off the poems as the work of a previously unknown priest to the literati of London. When that and other attempts to help his mother and sister out of poverty failed, at age 17 he committed suicide. Decades after his death, he was credited by Coleridge and Wordsworth as the founding spirit of Romanticism.
Shall we ruin an evening’s West End
bash with drunken verse of heaving
melancholy, or crash a hell club orgy? Wander
this empty circus back to our dead
air garret, sober enough to stagger
into morning? Let’s choke another quick
caesura and from our window stalk the motley
resurrectionists as they search for volunteers by whale
light below on Brook Street, wagon heavy
with surrendered bodies as they clatter toward the all
night office of the Company of Barber Surgeons. Let us
lie low lest our own immortality, by the physician’s cu
pego, be anatomized. If we listen, we’ll hear the hiss
of souls released to heaven by the pound.
About the writer:
George Rawlins has recent publications in The Common, New Critique (UK), New World Writing, Nine Mile, and One Hand Clapping (UK). His forthcoming poetry collection, Cheapside Afterlife (April 2021, Longleaf Press), reimagines in 57 sonnets the life of the 18th-century poet Thomas Chatterton.
Image: General View of the City of London, next the River Thames by unknown artists. Hand-colored engraving. No size specified. Circa 1750. Public domain.
