The poem
Encase your legs in nylons, Bestride your hills with pylons O age without a soul; Away with gentle willows And all the elmy billows That through your valleys roll.
Let's say goodbye to hedges And roads with grassy edges And winding country lanes; Let all things travel faster Where motor car is master Till only Speed remains.
Destroy the ancient inn-signs But strew the roads with tin signs 'Keep Left,' 'M4,' 'Keep Out!' Command, instruction, warning, Repetitive adorning The rockeried roundabout;
For every raw obscenity Must have its small 'amenity,' Its patch of shaven green, And hoardings look a wonder In banks of floribunda With floodlights in between.
Leave no old village standing Which could provide a landing For aeroplanes to roar, But spare such cheap defacements As huts with shattered casements Unlived-in since the war.
Let no provincial High Street Which might be your or my street Look as it used to do, But let the chain stores place here Their miles of black glass facia And traffic thunder through.
And if there is some scenery, Some unpretentious greenery, Surviving anywhere, It does not need protecting For soon we'll be erecting A Power Station there.
When all our roads are lighted By concrete monsters sited Like gallows overhead, Bathed in the yellow vomit Each monster belches from it, We'll know that we are dead.
Reprinted with the permission of John Murray (Publishers) Ltd.
A beautiful poem which questions the destrucive modernising which was occuring and still is. I fell in love with this poem when I first heard it, both because of the message which it conveys which, but also the aggressive manner used to drill it's message home.
Not only a gentleman in the old fashioned sense of the word but a visionary who took the early lead in Green issues long before it was hijacked by hordes of Toby and Amanda's that now fill our news with their twittering's learned by rote from their University courses. If their was ever a case for sainthood surely John would be at the head of the column. I rather admire his shambling English approach to events that…
Read the whole commentNot only a gentleman in the old fashioned sense of the word but a visionary who took the early lead in Green issues long before it was hijacked by
hordes of Toby and Amanda's that now fill our news with their twittering's learned by rote from their University courses. If their was ever a case for sainthood surely John would be at the head of the column. I rather admire his shambling English approach to events that peeve him, he writes a poem in this case that satirises the whole mess that we call civilisation now. Oh dear John Elysium is lost for ever, replaced by this awful American ersatz blob. However your words will ring through the ages as proof that there was civilisation once. We salute you
John Betjeman
What a beautifully sculpted piece of writing! Like Michael, I also fell in love with the poem and am now teaching it in my school to the young children. John Betjeman is an absolute inspiration and should get a lot more appreciation than he does now. He truly is an amazing writer.