Inexpensive Progress poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry

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.

 

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More poems by John Betjeman:

• Winter Seascape poem – John Betjeman poems
• Winter Landscape poem – John Betjeman poems
• Westgate-On-Sea poem – John Betjeman poems
• Verses Turned… poem – John Betjeman poems
• Upper Lambourne poem – John Betjeman poems
• Trebetherick poem – John Betjeman poems
• The Plantster’s Vision poem – John Betjeman poems
• The Olympic Girl poem – John Betjeman poems
• The Licorice Fields at Pontefract poem – John Betjeman poems
• The Last Laugh poem – John Betjeman poems
• The Irish Unionist’s farewell to Greta Hellastrom in 1922 poem – John Betjeman poems
• The Hon. Sec. poem – John Betjeman poems
• The Cottage Hospital poem – John Betjeman poems
• Sun and Fun poem – John Betjeman poems
• South London Sketch poem – John Betjeman poems
• Slough poem – John Betjeman poems
• Senex poem – John Betjeman poems
• Seaside Golf poem – John Betjeman poems
• On a Portrait of a Deaf Man poem – John Betjeman poems
• Myfanwy poem – John Betjeman poems
• Mortality poem – John Betjeman poems
• Middlesex poem – John Betjeman poems
• Meditation on the A30 poem – John Betjeman poems
• Loneliness poem – John Betjeman poems
• Ireland With Emily poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
• Inexpensive Progress poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
• In Westminster Abbey poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
• How To Get On In Society poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
• Harrow-on-the-Hill poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
• Guilt poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
• Felixstowe, or The Last of Her Order poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
• Executive poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
• Dilton Marsh Halt poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
• Diary of a Church Mouse poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
• Devonshire Street W.1 poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
• Death In Leamington poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
• Dawlish poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
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• A Shropshire Lad poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
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