The first stanza describes the riot as Carson remembers the events, and the sheer violence comes tumbling out.
As soon as the poem begins, the reader is hit in an urgent, dynamic fashion.
‘‘Suddenly, as the riot started…’’. This creates a sense of panic and causes the reader to explore the possibilities about why the riot squad has been involved in action. It also sets the tone for the rest of the poem.
In the second line, we see an exhaustive rush of words, which is describing about a car exploding. The poet finds it impossible to shape the sentence together. This may possibly be because he is distressed on recalling the event.
‘‘Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys.’’
We see some use of onomatopoeia in the poem between ‘fire’ and ‘stuttering’.
‘’This hyphenated line, a burst of rapid fire…I was trying to complete a sentence in
my head, but it kept stuttering.’’ The letters ‘t’ and ‘f’ are onomatopoeic. Here, he (the poet) shows confusion and difficulty in expressing himself.
The use of punctuation words means that there is a running theme through out the poem.
“raining exclamation marks…an asterisk on the map…hyphenated line…punctuated…with stops and colons…a fusillade of question marks”.
A meaning that could be taken from this is that sentences are one of a few things that differ us from animals. The fact that he was “trying to complete a sentence in his head” speaks volumes about his state of mind at the time.
Also, the actual use of punctuation in the poem slows the poem down so that the reader can reflect on what has happened but the full stops also represent gunfire and a dead end to for-fill his achievement -unable to escape anywhere.
‘‘Every move is punctuated. Crimea Street. Dead end again’’
In the second stanza, in the second last line, the poet inserts an empty line. He has done this to emphasise his disorientation and confusion from the bomb/explosion.
It is also rather odd that the poet has used question marks in the poem, as a good poem shouldn’t need to have unanswered questions at the end. These specific question marks are used for effect and also mean that he doesn’t have to formulate an opinion about what’s happening, an opinion that could upset those around him. They also allow the reader to make up their own opinion.
‘‘My name? Where am I coming from? Where am I going?’’
By saying “Saracen, Kremlin-2 mesh. Makrolon face-shields. Walkie-talkies”, he gives the reader an inhuman picture of the army by depicting it as a collection of military equipment, intimidating in its coldness. The actual sound of the line too with the predominant consonant “k” and heavily fragmented lines contribute to this effect.
Also, I think that when Carson says “Balaclava, Raglan, Inkerman, Odessa Street- why can’t I escape?” he is unsure of an area that he knows because of everything that is happening. This maybe because the memories of the incident haunt the writer as he struggles to explain the events. He is also, maybe unintentionally, dropping names as freely as confetti.
‘Slough’
Slough is a satrical poem and Betjeman himself satirises and despises it. He invites violence (wants town to be destroyed with a bomb) and he shows dislike when he criticises about how fake the town and the attitudes of the people who live there are. (He considers them to be narrow-minded and ignorant.) From what I understand, this poem wishes to convey a message to the reader. In Slough, the poet has no hopes for the future of the town and feels that a completely new start is necessary.
As soon as we start to read the poem, we see some different poetic devices used, for example: we see an oxymoron in the first few words.
‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough’. Here, the oxymoron is to do with the bombs because they are actually not friendly but the exact opposite…deadly!
We also see in the first stanza, a phrase that demonstrates Betjeman’s message about wishing that a new start would occur:
‘’Swarm over, Death!’’
In the poem Slough, the poet urges bombers to destroy Slough. He feels the town has no value,
‘‘mess up the mess they call a town’’ and that men who profit from cramped housing conditions deserve to be punished.
The poet thinks that not everyone is to blame, but has the opinion that having eaten too much artificial food, the humans in this town have become artificial themselves.
‘‘spare the bald young clerks’’
Throughout the poem Slough, there is a tone of cynical humour. The poet has strong feelings about housing conditions, but doesn’t really want Slough to be bombed.
‘come friendly bombs’. Perhaps the poet is using ‘friendly bombs’ as a metaphor, for government officials who might come and sort out the housing problems. At times the poet adopts a superior tone – ‘spare the bald young clerks’, ‘it’s not their fault, they do not know’ and in the first and final stanzas, the poet adopts an environmentalist tone. In the first stanza, the poet has explained that he feels the cramped housing is suffocating the earth beneath. However, the poem does end with a sense of calmness and relief.
‘’The earth exhales’’. Here, the poem ends with a clear sense of calmness as if the poet imagines bombs have gone off and the earth can breathe again, free from the disgusting town that once stood on it.
The poem Slough uses negative imagery throughout the poem. Repeating the word ‘tinned’ in the second verse conveys the idea that the people in Slough are eating artificial food and have consequently become artificial themselves. This is supported in stanza nine by the use of words to convey feeling of artificiality
‘frizz out peroxide hair, and dry it in synthetic air’. In verses six to nine the poet paints a picture of innocent but useless young men, conveying the idea that if these men are the future of Slough, then Slough has no future.
‘Daren’t look up and see the stars, but belch instead’. Perhaps the poet feels that Slough has no future, it may as well be bombed.
Slough is written as a rhyming poem in verses of four lines. It has a regular rhyme scheme, which is constant and unwavering attitude for Slough. The short rhyming style supports the cynical humour of the poem.
