John Betjeman
Inexpensive Progress
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
On a Portrait of a Deaf Man
The kind old face, the egg-shaped head, The tie, discreetly loud, The loosely fitting shooting clothes, A closely fitting shroud. He liked old city dining rooms, Potatoes in their skin, But now his mouth
Guilt
The clock is frozen in the tower, The thickening fog with sooty smell Has blanketed the motor power Which turns the London streets to hell; And footsteps with their lonely sound Intensify the silence
The Hon. Sec
The flag that hung half-mast today Seemed animate with being As if it knew for who it flew And will no more be seeing. He loved each corner of the links- The stream at
In A Bath Teashop
“Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another- Let us hold hands and look.” She such a very ordinary little woman; He such a thumping crook; But both, for a moment,
Westgate-On-Sea
Hark, I hear the bells of Westgate, I will tell you what they sigh, Where those minarets and steeples Prick the open Thanet sky. Happy bells of eighteen-ninety, Bursting from your freestone tower! Recalling
Winter Seascape
The sea runs back against itself With scarcely time for breaking wave To cannonade a slatey shelf And thunder under in a cave. Before the next can fully burst The headwind, blowing harder still,
Dilton Marsh Halt
Was it worth keeping the Halt open, We thought as we looked at the sky Red through the spread of the cedar-tree, With the evening train gone by? Yes, we said, for in summer
Felixstowe, or The Last of Her Order
With one consuming roar along the shingle The long wave claws and rakes the pebbles down To where its backwash and the next wave mingle, A mounting arch of water weedy-brown Against the tide
Loneliness
The last year’s leaves are on the beech: The twigs are black; the cold is dry; To deeps byond the deepest reach The Easter bells enlarge the sky. O ordered metal clatter-clang! Is yours
South London Sketch
From Bermondsey to Wandsworth So many churches are, Some with apsidal chancels, Some Perpendicular And schools by E. R. Robson In the style of Norman Shaw Where blue-serged adolescence learn’d To model and to
The Plantster's Vision
Cut down that timber! Bells, too many and strong, Pouring their music through the branches bare, From moon-white church towers down the windy air Have pealed the centuries out with Evensong. Remove those cottages,
Dawlish
Bird-watching colonels on the old sea wall, Down here at Dawlish where the slow trains crawl: Low tide lifting, on a shingle shore, Long-sunk islands from the sea once more: Red cliffs rising where
A Shropshire Lad
The gas was on in the Institute, The flare was up in the gym, A man was running a mineral line, A lass was singing a hymn, When Captain Webb the Dawley man, Captain
Devonshire Street W.1
The heavy mahogany door with its wrought-iron screen Shuts. And the sound is rich, sympathetic, discreet. The sun still shines on this eighteenth-century scene With Edwardian faience adornment Devonshire Street. No hope. And the