The Power of Irony
The overarching theme of the poem is the power of literary irony. The speaker of the poet is quite literally from the opening line calling for bombs to rain down upon a small English town and wreak what havoc they will. The reason for this extreme measure is the state in which the once pastoral village has fallen to, but even so, bombs raining down on a city seems the epic overstatement of an understated disaster. Maybe the city of Slough isn’t what it used to be and maybe the people living there have suffered for it, but it is well beyond all sense of reason to wish for a solution that calls for weapons of mass destruction to instantly kill countless innocent lives. And therein lies the irony and why it is sometimes the most powerful weapon to draw attention to a complaint or problem. A nice little prayer to God to set the town back on course would surely not have gotten so much attention and made the poem so controversial and kept it being read decades after its composition. The poem is a testament to the face that a little irony—the poem is only forty very short lines long—can go a long way.
How Topography Shapes a Population
Betjeman is famous for dealing with topographical matters in his poems, but in most of them he is far more likely to celebrate what he seems around him. Here, the topographical beauty of the Slough that once was has become homogenized and standardized to conform with what could be practically any other equitable town in Britain. Although not flatly stated, the premise at work in this poem is that the speaker must not believe that the citizens of Slough purposely set out to replace grass with cement and cows with cars and build ceilings to keep away starlight and radios to drown out the sounds of nature. These things were a consequence of progress, but they weren’t the goal of progress. The topographical standardization occurred as a by-product of necessary change, but they weren’t in themselves changes that were necessary. From this premise of unintended consequences, the speaker subtly draws a parallel between the standardization of what the city looks like to the standardization of the people itself. The suggestion is that the culture of a society inevitably reflects the choices made out of a desire to present that city to others. Without saying it in explicit terms, that opening call for bombs to rain down upon Slough is an assertion that conformity breeds conformity, external indifference breeds internal indifference and, ultimately, you can map the personality of a town’s population simply by mapping its topography.
