Property:Has text
From Off the Road Database
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<div class="poem">
<p>Drop those priggish ways for ever, stop behaving like a stone: <br />
Throw the bath-chairs right away, and learn to leave ourselves alone.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Or, in friendly fireside circle, sit and listen for the crash <br />
Meaning that the mob has realized something’s up, and start to smash;
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Run the whole night through in gumboots, stumble on and gasp for breath, <br />
Terrors drawing close and closer, winter landscape, fox’s death;
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Hope and fear are neck and neck: which is it near the course’s end <br />
Crashes, having lost his nerve; is overtaken on the bend?
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>If we really want to live, we’d better start at once to try; <br />
If we don’t, it doesn’t matter, but we’d better start to die.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Lawrence, Blake and Homer Lane, once healers in our English land; <br />
These are dead as iron for ever; these can never hold our hand.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Taught us at the annual camps arranged by the big business men <br />
‘Sunbathe, pretty till you’re twenty. You shall be our servants then.’
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Lawrence was brought down by smut-hounds, Blake went dotty as he sang, <br />
Homer Lane was killed in action by the Twickenham Baptist gang.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Power-stations locked, deserted, since they drew the boiler fires; <br />
Pylons fallen or subsiding, trailing dead high-tension wires;
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Far from there we spent the money, thinking we could well afford, <br />
While they quietly undersold us with their cheaper trade abroad;
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>On the sopping esplanade or from our dingy lodgings we <br />
Stare out dully at the rain which falls for miles into the sea.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Intimate as war-time prisoners in an isolation camp, <br />
Living month by month together, nervy, famished, lousy, damp.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Shut up talking, charming in the best suits to be had in town, <br />
Lecturing on navigation while the ship is going down.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>When we asked the way to Heaven, these directed us ahead <br />
To the padded room, the clinic and the hangman’s little shed.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Smokeless chimneys, damaged bridges, rotting wharves and choked canals, <br />
Tramlines buckled, smashed trucks lying on their side across the rails;
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Have things gone too far already? Are we done for? Must we wait <br />
Hearing doom’s approaching footsteps regular down miles of straight;
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Get there if you can and see the land you once were proud to own <br />
Though the roads have almost vanished and the expresses never run:
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>Perfect pater. Marvellous mater. Knock the critic down who dares — <br />
Very well, believe it, copy; till your hair is white as theirs.
</p>
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<div class="poem">
<p>At the theatre, playing tennis, driving motor cars we had, <br />
In our continental villas, mixing cocktails for a cad.
</p>
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