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

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

A Bay In Anglesey

The sleepy sound of a tea-time tide Slaps at the rocks the sun has dried, Too lazy, almost, to sink and lift Round low peninsulas pink with thrift. The water, enlarging shells and sand,

Death In Leamington

She died in the upstairs bedroom By the light of the ev’ning star That shone through the plate glass window From over Leamington Spa Beside her the lonely crochet Lay patiently and unstirred, But

Verses Turned

Across the wet November night The church is bright with candlelight And waiting Evensong. A single bell with plaintive strokes Pleads louder than the stirring oaks The leafless lanes along. It calls the hoirboys

Diary of a Church Mouse

Here among long-discarded cassocks, Damp stools, and half-split open hassocks, Here where the vicar never looks I nibble through old service books. Lean and alone I spend my days Behind this Church of England

Upper Lambourne

Up the ash tree climbs the ivy, Up the ivy climbs the sun, With a twenty-thousand pattering, Has a valley breeze begun, Feathery ash, neglected elder, Shift the shade and make it run –

Five O'Clock Shadow

This is the time of day when we in the Mens’s ward Think “one more surge of the pain and I give up the fight.” Whe he who strggles for breath can struggle less

Seaside Golf

How straight it flew, how long it flew, It clear’d the rutty track And soaring, disappeared from view Beyond the bunker’s back – A glorious, sailing, bounding drive That made me glad I was

Harrow-on-the-Hill

When melancholy Autumn comes to Wembley And electric trains are lighted after tea The poplars near the stadium are trembly With their tap and tap and whispering to me, Like the sound of little

Myfanwy

Kind o’er the kinderbank leans my Myfanwy, White o’er the playpen the sheen of her dress, Fresh from the bathroom and soft in the nursery Soap scented fingers I long to caress. Were you

Mortality

The first-class brains of a senior civil servant Shiver and shatter and fall As the steering column of his comfortable Humber Batters in the bony wall. All those delicate re-adjustments “On the one hand,

The Olympic Girl

The sort of girl I like to see Smiles down from her great height at me. She stands in strong, athletic pose And wrinkles her retroussй nose. Is it distaste that makes her frown,

The Irish Unionist's farewell to Greta Hellastrom in 1922

Golden haired and golden hearted I would ever have you be, As you were when last we parted Smiling slow and sad at me. Oh! the fighting down of passion! Oh! the century-seeming pain-

The Cottage Hospital

At the end of a long-walled garden in a red provincial town, A brick path led to a mulberry – scanty grass at its feet. I lay under blackening branches where the mulberry leaves

Senex

Oh would I could subdue the flesh Which sadly troubles me! And then perhaps could view the flesh As though I never knew the flesh And merry misery. To see the golden hiking girl

The Licorice Fields at Pontefract

In the licorice fields at Pontefract My love and I did meet And many a burdened licorice bush Was blooming round our feet; Red hair she had and golden skin, Her sulky lips were

How To Get On In Society

Phone for the fish knives, Norman As cook is a little unnerved; You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes And I must have things daintily served. Are the requisites all in the toilet? The frills

Middlesex

Gaily into Ruislip Gardens Runs the red electric train, With a thousand Ta’s and Pardon’s Daintily alights Elaine; Hurries down the concrete station With a frown of concentration, Out into the outskirt’s edges Where

Christmas

The bells of waiting Advent ring, The Tortoise stove is lit again And lamp-oil light across the night Has caught the streaks of winter rain In many a stained-glass window sheen From Crimson Lake

An Edwardian Sunday, Broomhill, Sheffield

High dormers are rising So sharp and surprising, And ponticum edges The driveways of gravel; Stone houses from ledges Look down on ravines. The vision can travel From gable to gable, Italianate mansion And

Slough

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

Business Girls

From the geyser ventilators Autumn winds are blowing down On a thousand business women Having baths in Camden Town Waste pipes chuckle into runnels, Steam’s escaping here and there, Morning trains through Camden cutting

Cornish Cliffs

Those moments, tasted once and never done, Of long surf breaking in the mid-day sun. A far-off blow-hole booming like a gun- The seagulls plane and circle out of sight Below this thirsty, thrift-encrusted

Back From Australia

Cocooned in Time, at this inhuman height, The packaged food tastes neutrally of clay, We never seem to catch the running day But travel on in everlasting night With all the chic accoutrements of

Executive

I am a young executive. No cuffs than mine are cleaner; I have a Slimline brief-case and I use the firm’s Cortina. In every roadside hostelry from here to Burgess Hill The maоtres d’hфtel

Ireland With Emily

Bells are booming down the bohreens, White the mist along the grass, Now the Julias, Maeves and Maureens Move between the fields to Mass. Twisted trees of small green apple Guard the decent whitewashed

A Subaltern's Love Song

Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun, What strenuous singles we played after tea, We in the tournament – you against me! Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of

Sun and Fun

I walked into the night-club in the morning; There was kummel on the handle of the door. The ashtrays were unemptied. The cleaning unattempted, And a squashed tomato sandwich on the floor. I pulled

Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican

Isn’t she lovely, “the Mistress”? With her wide-apart grey-green eyes, The droop of her lips and, when she smiles, Her glance of amused surprise? How nonchalantly she wears her clothes, How expensive they are

Trebetherick

We used to picnic where the thrift Grew deep and tufted to the edge; We saw the yellow foam flakes drift In trembling sponges on the ledge Below us, till the wind would lift

In Westminster Abbey

Let me take this other glove off As the vox humana swells, And the beauteous fields of Eden Bask beneath the Abbey bells. Here, where England’s statesmen lie, Listen to a lady’s cry. Gracious

Meditation on the A30

A man on his own in a car Is revenging himself on his wife; He open the throttle and bubbles with dottle And puffs at his pitiful life She’s losing her looks very fast,