The Scorcher And The Howling Swell - Analysis

A comic chase that turns into a sales pitch

This poem’s central joke is that it begins like a nonsense-ballad about two swaggering cyclists and ends as an unapologetic advertisement. The Scorcher and the Howling Swell ride through a landscape that offends their urban desire for smoothness: they wept like anything at the sight of hills on every hand. That exaggerated grief sets the tone—mock-dramatic, cheerful, and slightly silly—but it also sets up the poem’s real target: the impatience of people who want the world flattened to suit their comfort, speed, and style.

Speed, status, and the fantasy of leveling the country

The riders’ names are already caricatures. A Scorcher suggests a show-off who rides too fast; a Howling Swell suggests a loud, self-satisfied gentleman. Their first impulse is to treat geography like a civic engineering problem: If these were only levelled down, the world would be grand. The “solution” they imagine is equally absurd—getting every bloke that rides a bike to contribute a half-a-crown to “cut” the hills down. The poem gently ridicules this confidence: the Howling Swell’s doleful frown underlines that their money-and-male-solidarity scheme can’t actually fix what they don’t want to endure.

Inviting the ladies—then leaving them behind

When the Scorcher turns charming—ladies, come and ride with us—the poem shifts from landscape complaint to social comedy. He offers a carefully curated, respectable outing: across the park and down the smoothest street, with a flirtatious promise of very dainty feet. But the performance collapses once the riding starts. The Scorcher shoots up all the hills as if the same were flat, and the women call it very rude. Their blunt admission—all of us are out of breath; and some of us are fat—punctures the riders’ bravado and puts ordinary bodies back into the picture. The key tension here is between the riders’ idea of cycling as display (speed, elegance, conquest) and the group’s reality (breath, effort, embarrassment).

The tea-shop “miracle” and the final wink

The poem’s real turn arrives with the Howling Swell’s answer: not training, not patience, not slowing down, but a product. He points to a tea-shop by the way with Globe Brand Tea inside, claiming that all who drink it up any hill can ride. The ending doubles down, naming specific sellers—Atcherley and Dawson in George Street, near the Quay—and insisting that Scorchers and Swells proclaim its purity. What’s funny is how shamelessly the poem slides from mock-epic adventure into brand copy, as if the “magic” that levels hills was never money or muscle but marketing. The earlier dream of flattening the land is replaced by a quicker fantasy: that one cup of tea can make effort disappear.

If the hills won’t change, who is supposed to?

The poem keeps returning to the same stubborn fact—there are hills, and bodies get tired—while its characters keep reaching for shortcuts: half-crowns, flirtation, then a miracle beverage. The final joke leaves a sharper question behind: when the Howling Swell promises that tea lets all ride up any hill, is he offering kindness to the exhausted riders, or just another way to avoid slowing down for them?