City Spirits
Under Hadrian’s gaze,
Rome’s distant child sprang,
A bridge was laid down,
With fort upon outcrop,
Overlooking the work,
By Neptune’s wharf and altar,
Dogged burn cleft a town,
From lort and sludge,
To saturnine Tyne,
That in later time,
Would commerce and cargo flow,
Around shifting sands,
‘Pon our alien bridge,
Where port and dene meet,
Belted by wall,
And buckled by keep,
In pantheon and pilgrim’s view,
With bridge spans a-new
Castle built from coal,
And on this moored market,
Yet new arcs arrived,
At Ocean’s anchor,
In iron clad command,
Under industry’s spell,
With street lit against spire,
Awoke Bacchus with swirling crowd,
So here we may see,
The spirits on which it was found.
By Luan Hanratty
A Watchful Eye
Ghosts of the Past
800 Years of North Shields
No air-built castles, and no fairy bowers,
But thou, fair Tynemouth, and thy well-known towers,
Now bid th’ historic muse explore the maze
Of long past years, and tales of other days.
Pride of Northumbria!—from thy crowded port,
Where Europe’s brave commercial sons resort,
Her boasted mines send forth their sable stores,
To buy the varied wealth of distant shores.
Here the tall lighthouse, bold in spiral height,
Glads with its welcome beam the seaman’s sight.
Here, too, the firm redoubt, the rampart’s length,
The death-fraught cannon, and the bastion’s strength,
Hang frowning o’er the briny deep below,
To guard the coast against th’ invading foe.
Here health salubrious spreads her balmy wings,
And woos the sufferer to her saline springs;
And, here the antiquarian strays around
The ruin’d abbey, and its sacred ground.
Jane Harvey
From ‘The Castle of Tynemouth. A Tale’ (1806)
Photograph: Lee Stoneman
Photograph: Lee Stoneman
No air-built castles, and no fairy bowers,
But thou, fair Tynemouth, and thy well-known towers,
Now bid th’ historic muse explore the maze
Of long past years, and tales of other days.
Pride of Northumbria!—from thy crowded port,
Where Europe’s brave commercial sons resort,
Her boasted mines send forth their sable stores,
To buy the varied wealth of distant shores.
Here the tall lighthouse, bold in spiral height,
Glads with its welcome beam the seaman’s sight.
Here, too, the firm redoubt, the rampart’s length,
The death-fraught cannon, and the bastion’s strength,
Hang frowning o’er the briny deep below,
To guard the coast against th’ invading foe.
Here health salubrious spreads her balmy wings,
And woos the sufferer to her saline springs;
And, here the antiquarian strays around
The ruin’d abbey, and its sacred ground.
Jane Harvey
From ‘The Castle of Tynemouth. A Tale’ (1806)
