'The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more...'

 Last night on BBC4 (the only TV channel that does anything to justify the licence fee), I watched a rather wonderful documentary from 1977 called The Queen's Realm: England. Described as 'an aerial anthology of English landscape, poetry and music', it was directed and produced by Ed Mirzoeff and curated and contributed to by John Betjeman, who is very much the presiding spirit of the film. The aerial footage is impressive, and must have seemed quite cutting-edge at the time. It's all filmed from a helicopter – no drones then – presumably using the then novel Steadicam. Landscape, townscape and seascape, all flow by, all artfully mingled with judiciously chosen music and poetry; the effect is often beautiful and sometimes very moving. The poets featured include, among many others, Shakespeare (the John of Gaunt speech opens the film), Wordsworth, Tennyson, Hardy, Hopkins, Clare, Housman, Auden, Larkin and, of course, Betjeman – all immaculately read, by Michael Hordern and Richard Pasco, Prunella Scales and Junet Suzman, and, of course, old Betj himself. 
  What was most striking about the film was that – leaving aside some unchanging and unchangeable landscapes – it was showing us a lost land, a country so very different from the one we now live in, despite the relatively short distance in time. It was a country where factory chimneys still belched smoke, and industrial buildings from earlier times were still in use, where a building's purpose could be read from its appearance – no anonymous out-of-town hangars then – where fields still grew and harvested crops rather than solar panels and wind turbines. It was still a country, clearly, that made things, and one where people did recognisable jobs with simple names and clear purposes, unlike our increasingly abstract present, where so much that was solid has melted into air – a world in which, if you ask someone what their job is, chances are you won't understand the answer (if indeed it means anything). This was a world before computers in every home and office, before mobiles phones, before even the Sony Walkman. It was decidedly a more human world, and a simpler one, more innocent perhaps. I found myself mourning it, and wishing undone so much of what has happened since – even the internet itself, which might well prove to be the most destructive invention ever unleashed by mankind on itself. And yet I love it, and would, I fear, be lost without it. Damn it, if it wasn't for the internet I wouldn't be here, i.e. writing on this blog, which in turn wouldn't be here. This is all getting too vertiginous...
  Oh yes. One of the poets featured, whose work I didn't recognise and had to identify via Google (yes, that internet again) turned out to be Laurence Binyon, about whom I have written before, here and here. This was the passage featured in The Queen's Realm – it's the first stanza of a longer (too long) poem called 'The Burning of the Leaves':

'Now is the time for the burning of the leaves.
They go to the fire; the nostril pricks with smoke
Wandering slowly into a weeping mist.
Brittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves!
A flame seizes the smouldering ruin and bites
On stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.

The last hollyhock's fallen tower is dust;
All the spices of June are a bitter reek,
All the extravagant riches spent and mean.
All burns! The reddest rose is a ghost;
Sparks whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild
Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.

Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,
Idle solace of things that have gone before:
Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there;
Let them go to the fire, with never a look behind.
The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.

They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise
From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour,
And magical scents to a wondering memory bring;
The same glory, to shine upon different eyes.
Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.
Nothing is certain, only the certain spring.'

The Queen's Realm is available on the BBC iPlayer, for how long I don't know.