Soul.

INEXPENSIVE PROGRESS

Encase your legs in nylons,

Bestride your hills with pylons

O age without a soul;

Away with gentle willows

And all the elmy billows

That through your valleys roll.

Let's say goodbye to hedges

And roads with grassy edges

And winding country lanes;

Let all things travel faster

Where motor car is master

Till only Speed remains.

Destroy the ancient inn-signs

But strew the roads with tin signs

'Keep Left,' 'M4,' 'Keep Out!'

Command, instruction, warning,

Repetitive adorning

The rockeried roundabout;

For every raw obscenity

Must have its small 'amenity,'

Its patch of shaven green,

And hoardings look a wonder

In banks of floribunda

With floodlights in between.

Leave no old village standing

Which could provide a landing

For aeroplanes to roar,

But spare such cheap defacements

As huts with shattered casements

Unlived-in since the war.

Let no provincial High Street

Which might be your or my street

Look as it used to do,

But let the chain stores place here

Their miles of black glass facia

And traffic thunder through.

And if there is some scenery,

Some unpretentious greenery,

Surviving anywhere,

It does not need protecting

For soon we'll be erecting

A Power Station there.

When all our roads are lighted

By concrete monsters sited

Like gallows overhead,

Bathed in the yellow vomit

Each monster belches from it,

We'll know that we are dead.

John Betjemin