The Licorice Fields at Pontefract poem – John Betjeman poems

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 shaped for sin,

Her sturdy legs were flannel-slack’d

The strongest legs in Pontefract.

The light and dangling licorice flowers

Gave off the sweetest smells;

From various black Victorian towers

The Sunday evening bells

Came pealing over dales and hills

And tanneries and silent mills

And lowly streets where country stops

And little shuttered corner shops.

She cast her blazing eyes on me

And plucked a licorice leaf;

I was her captive slave and she

My red-haired robber chief.

Oh love! for love I could not speak,

It left me winded, wilting, weak,

And held in brown arms strong and bare

And wound with flaming ropes of hair.

 

***

 

More poems by John Betjeman:

• Winter Seascape poem – John Betjeman poems
• Winter Landscape poem – John Betjeman poems
• Westgate-On-Sea poem – John Betjeman poems
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• Upper Lambourne poem – John Betjeman poems
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• 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
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• On a Portrait of a Deaf Man poem – John Betjeman poems
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• Mortality poem – John Betjeman poems
• Middlesex poem – John Betjeman poems
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• Loneliness poem – John Betjeman poems
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