Lyrics Old Father Thames - Sol Invictus

Old Father Thames

The serpent in the bosom of London
The Thames, the serpent in the bosom of London
The Thames, the serpent in the bosom of London begins in one or more boggy
fields in Gloucestershire and ends in Southend at the crowstone:
an obelisk set in the sands to mark the boundry of the port of London
Authority.
Less imposing and considerably younger than Cleopatra’s needle near
the Waterloo Bridge, it still bears an uncanny snse of history as the tide gos
out, revealing it like a spire from Atlantis or the corpse city of R’lyeh
The serpent in the bosom of London
The Thames, the serpent in the bosom of London
The Thames, the serpent in the bosom of London
The Thames, the serpent in the bosom of London
In 1820 Fredrick Marryat captained HMS Rosario for the purpose of bringing the
news back to Britain of Napoleon’s death-in-exile on St. Helena.
A respected sailor and author, he later wrote about Thomas Saunders,
a fictional and archetypal mudlark and his life on the Thames, from digging up
coins and scraps on the river’s foreshore to becoming a pilot navigating
trading vessels through the labyrinthine docks and mudflats.
Marryat was
running against tide though.
The Victorian artist were more fascinated in a
river that brought death rather than life.
The medieval «Winchester Geese»
continued to haunt the river.
G. F. Watts painted «Found Drowned»,
John Everett Millais painted «Bridge of Sighs» sharing it’s title with Thomas
Hood’s poem.
All were artistic reactions to the working girls, brought low by
disease, pregnancy or despondency, who were found floating dead in the river
downstream from the Old Dock Bridge
The Thames, the serpent in the bosom of London