Each stanza of Edmund Spenser's poem "Prothalamion" ends by asking this river to "run softly, till I end my song."
In a Kipling poem, this entity tells a "tale" that notes "your history books begin" when "the Romans left and the Danes blew in!" This entity "lies like a rod of rippled jade" in Oscar Wilde's "Symphony in Yellow." Thomas Gray's poem about Eton College asks this entity, "What idle progeny succeed / To chase the rolling circle's speed, hoop's / Or urge the flying ball?" Matthew Arnold's "The Scholar-Gypsy" contrasts "this strange disease of modern life" with a time when "life ran gaily" like this place. In a poem set near this (*) body of water, the speaker hears "mind-forg'd manacles" in voices as he wanders "thro' every chartered street." Each stanza of Edmund Spenser's poem "Prothalamion" ends by asking this river to "run softly, till I end my song." For 10 points, William Blake wanders near the flow of what river in his poem "London?"
In a Kipling poem, this entity tells a "tale" that notes "your history books begin" when "the Romans left and the Danes blew in!"
River Thames ("temz") [or Father Thames; prompt on river until "body of water" is read]