Upper Lambourne poem – John Betjeman poems

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 –

Shift the shade toward the nettles,

And the nettles set it free,

To streak the stained Carrara headstone,

Where, in nineteen-twenty-three,

He who trained a hundred winners,

Paid the Final Entrance Fee.

Leathery limbs of Upper Lambourne,

Leathery skin from sun and wind,

Leathery breeches, spreading stables,

Shining saddles left behind –

To the down the string of horses

Moving out of sight and mind.

Feathery ash in leathery Lambourne

Waves above the sarsen stone,

And Edwardian plantations

So coniferously moan

As to make the swelling downland,

Far surrounding, seem their own.

 

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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
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