St Mary Woolnoth - Literary Reference

Literary Reference

  • T. S. Eliot refers to this church in a famous passage of his 1922 poem The Waste Land, Part 1, 'The Burial of the Dead':

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying, "Stetson!
You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

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