The construction of Betjemen’s “Slough” is remarkably conventional. The first three lines of each of verses consist of four iambs to create the basic rhyme pattern of AAAB. The repetitive rhyme which ends each of three first lines keeps the rhythm from lapsing into sing-song though considering the ironic engagement of such an astonishing generic and conventional pattern, the really amazing thing is that Betjemen did not allow himself to take the bitter sarcasm to the limit.
“Slough” has been read as mean-spirited harangue against a city whose only crime was falling in line behind progress. Of course, any poem that opens for bombs to fall upon a place in an act of merciful destruction is bound to be taken as an assault upon that location. This is especially true in the case of writer like Betjemen whose reputation was established upon a significant volume of topographical poetry.
It is in the construction of the verse that the real target of the speaker’s ire is identified. That construction is no way experimental or pushing the boundaries of poetic tradition. The language that is then layered over this convention framework is likewise fundamental. Slang like “smithereens” and “cad” is consistently being pushed up again the repetition of a word just used in the line above or, in the cased of “tinned” used six times over the course a dozen words making up two lines. The town of Slough presented in the poem is one that is heartbreakingly homogenized, synthesized and standardized. What the city really needs is to be cauterized to keep its unique identity that makes it worth existing in the first place for the poet from bleeding away entirely.
The subject of "Slough" is not really Slough. The bombs that the poet calls forth in the first line are described as “friendly” as they stand in direct opposition to the wicked bombs that have already rained down upon the town. Slough is emblematic of the wasteland of standardization that inevitably has the nefarious effect of contaminating the entire DNA of populating living there because it lowers expectations. The population of Slough paid no attention to the effect that the economic benefit of mass production was having on their psyche. Betjemen’s connection of the sterile inauthenticity of the architecture in which they live to the pernicious influence of synthetic appearance is all the proof he needs of this infection of a town’s very genetic identity. It came without warning and occurred with understanding and so not without an equal degree of anger and sadness, he is forced to admit of the people living there that “It's not their fault that they are mad, / They've tasted Hell.” Hell, for Betjemen, is convention arising unnoticed out standardization.
