John Betjeman S&D

Slough
====== John Betjeman

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town --
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week for half-a-crown
For twenty years,

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears,

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad,
They've tasted Hell.

It's not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It's not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sports and makes of cars
In various bogus Tudor bars
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

--
I particularly love the way the verses, starting from the fourth, are twinned with the ones they don't rhyme with, and the last with the first. It makes the poem feel like a chain. Obviously, if all his poems do this, it'd get tiring pretty quickly.

**I particularly love the way the verses, starting from the fourth, are twinned with the ones they don't rhyme with**

Actually, starting from the first: Death/breath, years/tears, yell/Hell, .... (Unless you're referring to something else?)

This too: "Devonshire Street W.1"
http://plagiarist.com/poetry/?wid=4452

Another example of this is from the first two lines of the poem linked above:

The heavy mahogany door with its wrought-iron screen
Shuts. And the sound is rich, sympathetic, discreet.

"Shuts" being the last word of the first sentence, and the first word of the second line.

I am so boring about this stuff.

"In among the silver birches
Winding waves of tarmac wander..."

I dug out Betjeman's Banana Blush recently. Well - Betjeman was on my mind. I had been on a train to Oxford to see an ILX0r when we stopped a Slough and the whole poem popped half-remembered into my head. Which got me thinking about his records - I was talking about them on twitter and Mark G identified them from my ramblings about "drunken grandfather reciting nostalgic poetry about girls over oom-pah music" <- which is actually a quite reductive and unfair description.

My mum used to play Banana Blush and Late Flowering Love repeatedly when I was a child, and the songs just worked their way into my subconscious, I think. Listening to them now, I realise how utterly unsuitable many of them were for young ears! But, being poetry, it was probably considered Morally Improving rather than as corrupting as it may have functioned. (My dad and I used to sing in the car "Rigid and dead! Rigid and dead to the Saturday congregation!" and I do wonder if I realised what it all meant.)

It's odd, now, when I listen to it, I'm overwhelmed with nostalgia and hiraeth for mine own childhood and England of the 70s - creating these overlapping waves with nostalgia for his own childhood in the early 20th century. (I suppose it's only natural I would find my way back to him, with his enthusiasms for Cornwall and florid Victorian architecture and all sorts of things i love.)

The music itself is quite distinctly odd, that mixture of early 70s pastoral English prog (lots of Cor Anglais, which to this day brings a nostalgic shiver to my spine) with bursts of what I think of as BBC Adaptation Soundtrack Music for interwar dramas. I wonder if I would love it so much if I came to it fresh, or if it's just something that wormed its way into my heart at such a young age.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmtF8LH2J34

I am becoming a complete cliche in mine old age, am I not? Sigh.