Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
The opening lines indicate just why this remains one of the most controversial poems in the history of England. The speaker is quite literally asking for an enemy’s bombs to shower from the sky and destroy the city of Slough. What a great opening, right?
Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.
Wondering what could cause a man to look to the skies and wish for a rain of destruction upon his town? Everything has become tin…artificial…prefabricated. There is no green left in Slough and more than that, there is no authenticity left to the town. The air isn’t real, the food isn’t real. The real has given over to the artificial. So what’s even the point of going on? It’s all just a pretense of reality.
But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad,
After asking specifically targeting greedy, fat factory owners for wrath and devastation, the speaker appears to be a redemptive state of mind when it comes to those poor saps forced to work for him.
In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.
The factories are not the only place where inauthenticity rules and the day and the real has been sublimated into the artificial. All those poor saps working for the man are merely collecting paychecks to turn over to wives halfway to becoming artificial women.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales
The closing lines of the poem present a portrait of the city of Slough following the dropping of the bonds. All artificiality has been laid to waste and everything’s gone green.
