II

I’m writing this in pencil on my knee,
Using my other hand to stop me yawning,
Upon a primitive, unsheltered quay
In the small hours of a Wednesday morning.
I cannot add the summer day is dawning;
In Seydhisfjördur every schoolboy knows
That daylight in the summer never goes.

To get to sleep in latitudes called upper
Is difficult at first for Englishmen.
It’s like being sent to bed before your supper
For playing darts with father’s fountain-pen,
Or like returning after orgies, when
Your breath’s like luggage and you realize
You’ve been more confidential than was wise.


I’ve done my duty, taken many notes
Upon the almost total lack of greenery,
The roads, the illegitimates, the goats:
To use a rhyme of yours, there’s handsome scenery
Bur little agricultural machinery;
And with the help of Sunlight Soap the Geysir
Affords to visitors le plus grand plaisir.

I’ll clear my throat and take a Rover’s breath
And skip a century of hope and sin—
For far too much has happened since your death.
Crying went out and the cold bath came in,
With drains, bananas, bicycles, and tin,
And Europe saw from Ireland to Albania
The Gothic revival and the Railway Mania.

Well, you might think so if you went to Surrey
And stayed for week-ends with the well-to--do,
Your car too fast, too personal your worry
To look too closely at the wheeling view.
But in the north it simply isn’t true.
To those who live in Warrington or Wigan,
It’s not a white lie, it’s a whacking big ‘un.

On economic, health, um moral grounds
It hasn’t got the least excuse to show;
No more than chamber pots or otter hounds;
But let me say before it has to go,
It’s the must lovely country that I know;
Clearer than Seafell Pike, my heart has stamped on
The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton.

Hail to the New World! Hail to those who’ll love
Its antiseptic objects, feel at home.
Lovers will gaze at an electric stove,
Another poésie de départ come
Centred round bus-stops or the aerodrome.
But give me still, to stir imagination
The chiaroscuro of the railway station,

But you want facts, not sighs. I’ll do my best
To give a few; you can’t expect them all.
To start with, on the whole we’re better dressed;
For chic the difference to-day is small
Of barmaid from my lady at the Hall.
It’s sad no spoil this democratic vision
With millions suffering from malnutrition.

We’ve always had a penchant for field sports,
But what do you think has grown up in our towns?
A passion for the open air and shorts;
The sun is one of our emotive nouns.
Go down by chara’ to the Sussex Downs,
Watch the manoeuvres of the week-end hikers
Massed on parade with Kodaks or with Leicas.

You lived and moved among the best society
And so could introduce your hero to it
Without the slightest tremor of anxiety;
Because he was your hero and you knew it,
He’d know instinctively what’s done, and do it.
He’d find our day more difficult than yours
For industry has mixed the social drawers.

The porter at the Carlton is my brother,
He’ll wish me a good evening if I pay,
For tips and men are equal to each other.
I’m sure that Vogue would be the first to say
Que le Beau Monde is socialist today;
And many a bandit, nor so gently born
Kills vermin every winter with the Quorn.

Don Juan was a mixer and no doubt
Would find this century as good as any
For getting hostesses to ask him out,
And mistresses that need not cost a penny.
Indeed our ways to waste time are so many,
Thanks to technology, a list of these
Would make a longer book than Ulysses.

I see his face in every magazine.
‘Don Juan at lunch with one of Cochran’s ladies.’
‘Don Juan with his red setter May MacQueen.’
‘Don Juan, who’s just been wintering in Cadiz,
Caught at the wheel of his maroon Mercedes.’
‘Don Juan at Croydon Aerodrome.’ ‘Don Juan
Snapped in the paddock with the Aga Khan.’

The vogue for Black Mass and the cult of devils
Has sunk. The Good, the Beautiful, the True
Still fluctuate about the lower levels.
Joyces are firm and there there’s nothing new.
Eliots have hardened just a point or two.
Hopkins are brisk, thanks to some recent boosts.
There’s been some further weakening in Prousts.

Now for the spirit of the people. Here
I know I’m treading on more dangerous ground:
I know there’re many changes in the air,
But know my data too slight to be sound,
I know, too, I’m inviting the renowned
Retort of all who love the Status Quo:
‘you can’t change human nature, don’t you know!’

But he’s another man in many ways:
Ask the cartoonist first, for he knows best.
Where is the John Bull of the good old days,
The swaggering bully with the clumsy jest?
His meaty neck has long been laid to rest,
His acres of self-confidence for sale;
He passed away at Ypres and Passchendaele.

Begot on Hire Purchase by Insurance,
Forms at his christening worshipped and adored;
A season ticket schooled him in endurance,
A tax collector and a waterboard
Admonished him. In boyhood he was awed
By a matric, and complex apparatuses
Keep his heart conscious of Divine Afflatuses.

‘I am the ogre’s private secretary;
I’ve felt his stature and his powers, learned
To give his ogreship the raspberry
Only when his gigantic back is turned.
One day, who knows, I’ll do as I have yearned.
The short man, all his fingers on the door,
With repartee shall send him to the floor.’

Ho dreads the ogre, but he dreads yet more
Those who conceivably might set him free,
Those the cartoonist has no time to draw.
Without his bondage he’d be all at sea;
The ogre need but shout ‘Security’,
To make this man, so lovable, so mild,
As madly cruel as a frightened child.

Suggestions have been made that the Teutonic
Führer-Prinzip would have appealed to you
As being the true heir to the Byronic—
In keeping with your social status too
(It has its English converts, fit and few),
That you would, hearing honest Oswald’s call,
Be gleichgeschaltet in the Albert Hall.

You liked to be the centre of attention,
The gay Prince Charming of the fairy story,
Who tamed the Dragon by his intervention.
In modern warfare though it’s just as gory,
There isn’t any individual glory;
The Prince must be anonymous, observant,
A kind of lab—buy, or a civil servant,

Against the ogre, dragon, what you will;
His many shapes and names all turn us pale,
For he’s immortal, and today he still
Swinges the horror of his scaly tail.
Sometimes he seems to sleep, but will not fail
In every age to rear up to defend
Each dying force of history to the end.

Banker or landlord, booking-clerk or Pope,
Whenever he’s lost faith in choice and thought,
When a man sees the future without hope,
Whenever he endorses Hobbes’ report
‘The life of man is nasty, brutish, short,’
The dragon rises from his garden border
And promises to set up law and order.

Forgive me for inflicting all this on you,
For asking you to hold the baby for us;
It’s easy to forget that where you’ve gone, you
May only want to chat with Set and Horus,
Bored to extinction with our earthly chorus:
Perhaps it sounds to you like a trunk-call,
Urgent, it seems, but quite inaudible.

We’re out at sea now, and I wish we weren’t;
The sea is rough, I don’t care if it’s blue;
I’d like to have a quick one, but I daren’t.
And I must interrupt this screed to you,
For I’ve some other little jobs to do;
I must write home or mother will be vexed,
So this must be continued in our next.

The North, though, never was your cup of tea;
‘Moral’ you thought it so you kept away.
And what I’m sure you’re wanting now from me
Is news about the England of the day,
What sort of things La Jeunesse do and say.
Is Brighton still as proud of her pavilion,
And is it safe for girls to travel pillion?

We’re entering now the Eotechnic Phase
Thanks to the Grid and all these new alloys;
That is, at least, what Lewis Mumford says.
A world of Aertex underwear for boys,
Huge plate-glass windows, walls absorbing noise,
Where the smoke nuisance is utterly abated
And all the furniture is chromium-plated.

There on the old historic battlefield,
The cold ferocity of human wills,
The scars of struggle are as yet unhealed;
Slattern the tenements on sombre hills,
And gaunt in valleys the square-windowed mills
That, since the Georgian house, in my conjecture
Remain our finest native architecture.

Long, long ago, when I was only four,
Going towards my grandmother, the line
Passed through a coal-field. From the corridor
I watched it pass with envy, thought ‘How fine!
Oh how I wish that situation mine.’
Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery,
That was, and still is, my ideal scenery.

Preserve me from the Shape of Things to Be;
The high-grade posters at the public meeting,
The influence of Art on Industry,
The cinemas with perfect taste in seating;
Preserve me, above all, from central heating.
It may be D. H. Lawrence hocus-pocus,
But I prefer a room that’s got a focus.

Again, our age is highly educated;
There is no lie our children cannot read,
And as MacDonald might so well have stated
We’re growing up and up and up indeed.
Advertisements can teach us all we need;
And death is better, as the millions know,
Than dandruff, night-starvation, or B.O.

Those movements signify our age-long role
Of insularity has lost its powers;
The cult of salads and the swimming pool
Comes from a climate sunnier than ours,
And lands which never heard of licensed hours,
The south of England before very long
Will look no different from the Continong.

We’ve grown, you see, a lot more democratic,
And Fortune’s ladder is for all to climb;
Carnegie on this point was must emphatic.
A humble grandfather is not a crime,
At least, if father made enough in time!
Today, thank God, we’ve got no snobbish feeling
Against the more efficient modes of stealing.

Adventurers, though, must take things as they find them
And look for pickings where the pickings are.
The drives of love and hunger are behind them,
They can’t afford to be particular:
And these who like good cooking and a car,
A certain kind of costume or of face,
Must seek them in a certain kind of place.

Yes, in the smart set he would know his way
By second nature with no tips from me.
Tennis and Golf have come in since your day;
But those who are as good at games as he
Acquire the back-hand quite instinctively,
Take to the steel.-shaft and hole out in one,
Master the books of Ely Culbertson.

But if in highbrow circles he would sally
It’s just as well to warn him there’s no stain on
Picasso, all-in-wrestling, or the Ballet.
Sibelius is the man. To get a pain on
Listening to Elgar is a sine qua non.
A second-hand acquaintance of Pareto’s
Ranks higher than an intimate of Plato’s.

I’m saying this to tell you who’s the rage,
And not to loose a sneer from my interior.
Because there’s snobbery in every age,
Because some names are loved by the superior,
It does nor follow they’re the least inferior:
For all I know the Beatific Vision’s
On view at all Surrealist Exhibitions.

We’ve still, it’s true, the same shape and appearance,
We haven’t changed the way that kissing’s done;
The average man still hates all interference,
Is just as proud still of his new-born sun:
Still, like a hen, he likes his private run,
Scratches for self-esteem, and slyly pocks
A good deal in the neighbourhood of sex.

Tom to the work of Disney or of Strube;
There stands our hero in um threadbare seams;
The bowler hat who strap-hangs in the tube,
And kicks the tyrant only in his dreams,
Trading on pathos, dreading all extremes;
The little Mickey with the hidden grudge;
Which is the better, I leave you to judge.

‘I am like you,’ he says, ‘and you, and you,
I love my life, I love the home.-fires, have
To keep them burning. Heroes never do.
Heroes are sent by ogres to the grave.
I may net be courageous, but I save.
I am the one who somehow turns the corner,
I may perhaps be fortunate Jack Horner.

One day, which day? O any other day,
But not today. The ogre knows his man.
To kill the ogre that would take away
The fear in which his happy dreams began,
And with his life he’ll guard dreams while he can.
Those who would really kill his dream’s contentment
He hates with real implacable resentment.

Byron, thou should’st be living at this hour!
What would you do, I wonder, if you were?
Britannia’s lost prestige and cash and power,
Her middle classes show some wear and tear,
We’ve learned to bomb each other from the air;
I can’t imagine what the Duke of Wellington
Would say about the music of Duke Ellington.

‘Lord Byron at the head of his storm—troopers!’
Nothing, says science, is impossible:
The Pope may quit to join the Oxford Groupers,
Nuffield may leave one farthing in his Will,
There may be someone who trusts Baldwin still,
Someone may think that Empire wines are nice,
There may be people who hear Tauber twice,

You never were an Isolationist;
Injustice you had always hatred for,
And we can hardly blame you, if you missed
Injustice just outside your lordship’s door:
Nearer than Greece were cotton and the poor.
Today you might have seen them, might indeed
Have walked in the United Front with Gide,

Milton beheld him on the English throne,
And Bunyan sitting in the Papal chair;
The hermits fought him in their caves alone,
At the first Empire he was also there,
Dangling his Pax Romana in the air:
He comes in dreams at puberty to man,
To scare him back to childhood if he can.

He that in Athens murdered Socrates,
And Plato then seduced, prepares to make
A desolation and to call it peace
Today for dying magnates, for the sake
Of generals who can scarcely keep awake,
And for that doughy mass in great and small
That doesn’t want to stir itself at all.

Yet though the choice of what is to be done
Remains with the alive, the rigid nation
Is supple still within the breathing one;
Its sentinels yet keep their sleepless station,
And every man in every generation,
Tossing in his dilemma on his bed,
Cries to the shadows of the noble dead.