Lyrics The Lost Rivers of London - Coil

The Lost Rivers of London

I’m gonna drown myself in London’s lost rivers
I will walk down to the rain
From Hubert Montague Crackenthorpe’s Vignettes (1896):
I have sat there and seen the winter days finish their short-spanned lives;
and all the globes of light — crimson, emerald, and pallid yellow — start,
one by one, out of the russet fog that creeps up the river.
But I like the
place best on these hot summer nights, when the sky hangs thick with stifled
colour, and the stars shine small and shyly.
Then the pulse of the city is hushed, and the scales of the water flicker golden and oily under the watching
regiment of lamps.
The bridge clasps its gaunt arms tight from bank to bank, and the shuffle of a retreating figure sounds loud and alone in the quiet.
There, if you wait long
enough, you will hear the long wail of the siren, that seems to tell of the
anguish of London till a train hurries to throttle its dying note,
roaring and rushing, thundering and blazing through the night, tossing its
white crests of smoke, charging across the bridge into the dark country beyond.
In the wan, lingering light of the winter afternoon, the parks stood all
deserted, sluggishly drowsing, so it seemed, with their spacious distances
muffled in greyness: colourless, fabulous, blurred.
One by one, through the
damp misty air, looked the tall, stark, lifeless elms.
Overhead there lowered a turbid sky, heavy-charged with an unclean yellow, and amid their ugly patches
of dank and rotting bracken, a little mare picked her way noiselessly.
The rumour of life seemed hushed.
There was only the vague listless rhythm of the creaking saddle.
The daylight faded.
A shroud of ghostly mist enveloped the earth,
and up from the vaporous distance crept slowly the evening darkness.
A sullen glow throbs overhead: golden will-o'-the-wisps are threading their
shadowy ribbons above golden trees, and the dull, distant rumour of feverish
London waits on the still night air.
The lights of Hyde Park Corner blaze like
some monster, gilded constellation, shaming the dingy stars.
And across the
east, there flares a sky-sign, a gaudy crimson arabesque.
And all the air hangs
draped in the mysterious sumptuous splendour of a murky London night.
I’m gonna drown myself in the lost rivers of London
I am gonna drown myself in the lost rivers of London