This week’s choice is “A Shropshire Lad” by John Betjeman which I have chosen from a book of Betjeman’s collected poetry.
Swimming along—
John Betjeman (1906—1984)
Swimming along—
Swimming along from Severn,
And paying a call at Dawley Bank while swimming along to Heaven.
Poem 416. A Shropshire Lad
The gas was on in the Institute,
The flare was up in the gym,
A man was running a mineral line,
A lass was singing a hymn,
When Captain Webb the Dawley man,
Captain Webb from Dawley,
Came swimming along the old canal
That carried the bricks to Lawley.
Swimming along—
Swimming along—
Swimming along from Severn,
And paying a call at Dawley Bank while swimming along to Heaven.
The sun shone low on the railway line
And over the bricks and stacks
And in at the upstairs windows
Of the Dawley houses’ backs
When we saw the ghost of Captain Webb,
Webb in a water sheeting,
Come dripping along in a bathing dress
To the Saturday evening meeting.
Dripping along—
Dripping along—
To the Congregational Hall;
Dripping and still he rose over the sill and faded away in a wall.
There wasn’t a man in Oakengates
That hadn’t got hold of the tale,
And over the valley in Ironbridge,
And round by Coalbrookdale,
How Captain Webb the Dawley man,
Captain Webb from Dawley,
Rose rigid and dead from the old canal
That carries the bricks to Lawley.
Rigid and dead—
Rigid and dead—
To the Saturday congregation,
Paying a call at Dawley Bank on the way to his destination.
In this poem Betjeman imagines the ghost of the swimmer Captain Matthew Webb (the first man to swim the English Channel) returning as a ghost to the industrial places where he grew up. Webb was born at Dawley in Shropshire and the other places mentioned are all nearby. Coalbrookdale and Ironbridge are seminal places in the history of the Industrial Revolution while Lawley and Oakengates are smaller but also key places in the story.
Webb died in 1883 aged 35 while trying to swim the Whirlpool Rapids at Niagara Gorge and is buried in Oakwood Cemetery in New York State but Betjeman pictures his shade “swimming along the old canal/That carried the bricks to Lawley” and rising up to confront the worshippers at “the Saturday evening meeting”.
Betjeman conjures up the industrial nature of the area—gas lighting, the mineral line (a railway carrying mined and processed minerals), the canals carrying bricks amongst other manufactured goods, the bricks and stacks of the factories and iron works and introduces the spectral and rather incongruous figure of Webb: the repeated phrase “Swimming along” reminds us of Webb’s labours and evokes the dogged nature that must have been needed to battle across the Channel. The phrase “Webb in a water sheeting” suggests that the spectre is cloaked in a film of water that resembles a shroud.
The title references A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad—a collection of poems reflecting a idyllic pastoral existence—but subverts it by presenting the stark industrial heritage of the county and punning on the fact that Webb was genuinely a Shropshire Lad whereas Housman’s protagonist is a more nebulous concept: Housman only visited the county after he had begun writing the poems. There is an overlap in that both poems reference the death of young men: Housman reflects on mortality generally while Betjeman’s poem is about a specific case.
Betjeman hints that the ghost appears at a Saturday evening temperance meeting (“a lass was singing a hymn” and “Dripping along—/To the Congregational Hall”), so that there can be no suggestion that the witnesses have discovered the ghost in a bottle or two.
I like it because it is such an odd poem, a ghost story set in an industrial landscape which now lies dormant. I visited Coalbrookdale and Ironbridge earlier this year with Rachel and they are now part of the history of industry rather than the vibrant heart of it. New Mills in Derbyshire is another place we visited on a different occasion, and it has much the same feel.
I first heard this poem back in the 1990s on Nicky Campbell’s late night radio show—I can’t remember who performed it and it lay dormant in my memory until I bought the collected works of Betjeman when I was in Scotland. I discovered that he was the writer and I decided I would choose it for Poet’s Day.
I found several performances of the poem on YouTube but the one I liked best was Betjeman reading the poem himself accompanied by music composed by Jim Parker from the 1974 album Sir John Betjeman’s Banana Blush.