XXII

Get there if you can and see the land you once were proud to own
Though the roads have almost vanished and the expresses never run:

Smokeless chimneys, damaged bridges, rotting wharves and choked canals,
Tramlines buckled, smashed trucks lying on their side across the rails;

Power-stations locked, deserted, since they drew the boiler fires;
Pylons fallen or subsiding, trailing dead high-tension wires;

Head-gears gaunt on grass-grown pit-banks, seams abandoned years ago;
Drop a stone and listen for its splash in flooded dark below.

Squeeze into the works through broken windows or through damp-sprung doors;
See the rotted shafting, see holes gaping in the upper floors;

Where the Sunday lads come talking motor bicycle and girl,
Smoking cigarettes in chains until their heads are in a whirl.

Far from there we spent the money, thinking we could well afford,
While they quietly undersold us with their cheaper trade abroad;

At the theatre, playing tennis, driving motor cars we had,
In our continental villas, mixing cocktails for a cad.

These were boon companions who devised the legends for our tombs,
These who have betrayed us nicely while we took them to our rooms.

Newman, Ciddy, Plato, Fronny, Pascal, Bowdler, Baudelaire,
Doctor Frommer, Mrs Allom, Freud, the Baron, and Flaubert.

Lured with their compelling logic, charmed with beauty of their verse,
With their loaded sideboards whispered ‘Better join us, life is worse.’

Taught us at the annual camps arranged by the big business men
‘Sunbathe, pretty till you’re twenty. You shall be our servants then.’

Perfect pater. Marvellous mater. Knock the critic down who dares —
Very well, believe it, copy; till your hair is white as theirs.

Yours you say were parents to avoid, avoid then if you please
Do the reverse on all occasion till you catch the same disease.

When we asked the way to Heaven, these directed us ahead
To the padded room, the clinic and the hangman’s little shed.

Intimate as war-time prisoners in an isolation camp,
Living month by month together, nervy, famished, lousy, damp.

On the sopping esplanade or from our dingy lodgings we
Stare out dully at the rain which falls for miles into the sea.

Lawrence, Blake and Homer Lane, once healers in our English land;
These are dead as iron for ever; these can never hold our hand.

Lawrence was brought down by smut-hounds, Blake went dotty as he sang,
Homer Lane was killed in action by the Twickenham Baptist gang.

Have things gone too far already? Are we done for? Must we wait
Hearing doom’s approaching footsteps regular down miles of straight;

Run the whole night through in gumboots, stumble on and gasp for breath,
Terrors drawing close and closer, winter landscape, fox’s death;

Or, in friendly fireside circle, sit and listen for the crash
Meaning that the mob has realized something’s up, and start to smash;

Engine-drivers with their oil-cans, factory girls in overalls
Blowing sky-high monster stores, destroying intellectuals?

Hope and fear are neck and neck: which is it near the course’s end
Crashes, having lost his nerve; is overtaken on the bend?

Shut up talking, charming in the best suits to be had in town,
Lecturing on navigation while the ship is going down.

Drop those priggish ways for ever, stop behaving like a stone:
Throw the bath-chairs right away, and learn to leave ourselves alone.

If we really want to live, we’d better start at once to try;
If we don’t, it doesn’t matter, but we’d better start to die.