"The peasant river"

clarke quay, originally uploaded by Wahj.

"The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays"
- "In Memory of W.B. Yeats", Auden

When I first read those lines by Auden, the Singapore river came to mind, winding past Boat Quay and Clarke Quay, but brown and muddy all the same. The two quays may have gotten all dressed up and forgotten their humble origins, but the river remembers: it is still the same simple river it was two hundred years ago.