WICKES
07-24-2013, 11:30 AM
Is anyone familiar with this poet? He was an English-British poet, born in 1906, died 1984, a friend of Evelyn Waugh at Oxford (where C S Lewis was his tutor) and eventually the British poet laureate. I've just finished reading his collected poems and he's wonderful. Though he can be quite melancholy, and obviously had a dread of illness and death, there is a celebratory feel to his poetry, as if, at times, he is writing for the sheer joy of it. I love that. I often feel there is too much pain and depression in poetry and not enough joy and celebration. For example, this is from his poem 'Seaside Golf':
"How straight it flew, how long it flew,
It clear'd the rutty track
And soaring, disappeared from view
Beyond the bunker's back-
A glorious, sailing, bounding drive
That made me glad I was alive.
Betjeman was a conservative, though not a reactionary, and much of his poetry is concerned with the destruction of England's landscape and architecture by soulless, profit-hungry builders and developers. He had been an aesthete at Oxford and remained unapologetically on the side of beauty (churches and cathedrals, run down village pubs, old, soot-coated train stations) and against 'progress' (smart concrete and glass tower blocks, new housing estates). When he is angry he can be genuinely savage (and funny). The poem Slough, about the English town in which Ricky Gervais set The Office (and which Brent reads aloud at one point), is a real gem, a magnificent blast against the ugly emptiness of modern suburban life. But for me he is at his best when he's praising something. This is from a poem about a childhood birthday party:
"And who can still one's thrill at the candle shine
On cakes and ices and jelly and blackcurrant wine,
And the warm little feel of my hostess's hand in mine?
Or these wonderful lines about England's Atlantic coastline:
"Ah! seaweed smells from sandy caves
And thyme and mist in whiffs,
In-coming tide, Atlantic waves
Slapping the sunny cliffs,
Lark song and sea sounds in the air
And splendour, splendour everywhere.
Here he is on one of his (almost obsessive) loves, the bells of old churches:
"Across the wet November night
The church is bright with candlelight
And waiting Evensong.
A single bell with plaintive strokes
Pleads louder than the stirring oaks
The leafless lanes along.
It calls the choirboys from their tea
And villagers, the two or three,
Damp down the kitchen fire,
Let out the cat, and up the lane
Go paddling through the gentle rain
Of misty Oxfordshire"
And again celebrating natural beauty:
"The smack of breakers upon windy rocks,
Spray blowing backwards from their curling walls
Of green translucent water"
But I think these are my favourite lines. This is the conclusion to his long poem 'Beside the Seaside':
"And all the time the waves, the waves, the waves
Chase, intersect and flatten on the sand
As they have done for centuries, as they will
For centuries to come, when not a soul
Is left to picnic on the blazing rocks,
When England is not England, when mankind
Has blown himself to pieces. Still the sea,
Consolingly disastrous, will return
While the strange starfish, hugely magnified,
Waits in the jewelled basin of a pool"
"How straight it flew, how long it flew,
It clear'd the rutty track
And soaring, disappeared from view
Beyond the bunker's back-
A glorious, sailing, bounding drive
That made me glad I was alive.
Betjeman was a conservative, though not a reactionary, and much of his poetry is concerned with the destruction of England's landscape and architecture by soulless, profit-hungry builders and developers. He had been an aesthete at Oxford and remained unapologetically on the side of beauty (churches and cathedrals, run down village pubs, old, soot-coated train stations) and against 'progress' (smart concrete and glass tower blocks, new housing estates). When he is angry he can be genuinely savage (and funny). The poem Slough, about the English town in which Ricky Gervais set The Office (and which Brent reads aloud at one point), is a real gem, a magnificent blast against the ugly emptiness of modern suburban life. But for me he is at his best when he's praising something. This is from a poem about a childhood birthday party:
"And who can still one's thrill at the candle shine
On cakes and ices and jelly and blackcurrant wine,
And the warm little feel of my hostess's hand in mine?
Or these wonderful lines about England's Atlantic coastline:
"Ah! seaweed smells from sandy caves
And thyme and mist in whiffs,
In-coming tide, Atlantic waves
Slapping the sunny cliffs,
Lark song and sea sounds in the air
And splendour, splendour everywhere.
Here he is on one of his (almost obsessive) loves, the bells of old churches:
"Across the wet November night
The church is bright with candlelight
And waiting Evensong.
A single bell with plaintive strokes
Pleads louder than the stirring oaks
The leafless lanes along.
It calls the choirboys from their tea
And villagers, the two or three,
Damp down the kitchen fire,
Let out the cat, and up the lane
Go paddling through the gentle rain
Of misty Oxfordshire"
And again celebrating natural beauty:
"The smack of breakers upon windy rocks,
Spray blowing backwards from their curling walls
Of green translucent water"
But I think these are my favourite lines. This is the conclusion to his long poem 'Beside the Seaside':
"And all the time the waves, the waves, the waves
Chase, intersect and flatten on the sand
As they have done for centuries, as they will
For centuries to come, when not a soul
Is left to picnic on the blazing rocks,
When England is not England, when mankind
Has blown himself to pieces. Still the sea,
Consolingly disastrous, will return
While the strange starfish, hugely magnified,
Waits in the jewelled basin of a pool"