The Past Is Another Country

A poem in which literary pretensions and Englishness fuse into a nostalgic tour de force, but all may not be as it seems in the rose tinted spectacle stakes.

Category

Funny Literary Poems

Sub-category

Nostalgic poems

Author

Hooray for Harry Graham

Hooray for Harry Graham and Ogden Nash as well,
Hooray for Auntie Mildred, so deaf we had to yell,
Hooray for Hillarie Belloc and Godfrey Gordon Gore,
Grandma and Auntie Vera and the dachshund from next door.

Hooray for English drawing rooms and lukewarm cups of tea,
For Aunts and Babes and Governess and Sailors home from sea.
Hooray for Johnny Betjeman and dear Miss Hunter Dunn,
And Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen and Ermintrude the nun.

Hooray for cream and strawberries and croquet lawns at four,
And chaperones and debutants and grand old men who bore.
Hooray for vanished England, that green and verdant land,
Hooray for village cricket and the HP sauce brass band.

Hooray for happy days gone by that didn’t exist at all,
Except in fertile minds and hearts of poets great and small.

Copyright © Max Scratchmann. All Rights Reserved

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