‘April is the cruellest month’ … words that came to mind constantly in April eight years ago during the search for two fishermen off the shore of Skerries (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Patrick Comerford
Education and Training Workshops for Clergy and Readers
Diocese of Limerick and Killaloe
Monday 13 May 2019
1.30 p.m.:
2: The poetry of TS Eliot and John Betjeman
Part 1: The poetry of TS Eliot
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
These are the opening words of TS Eliot’s poem,
The Waste Land (1922), which is regarded a one of the most important poems of the 20th century.
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
These words came to mind constantly for me in April eight years ago [2011] as I thought again and again of the people in Skerries, Co Dublin, who were searching desperately for two missing fishermen:
April is the cruellest month … I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Throughout the poem we find allusions to
The Book of Common Prayer, and Old Testament allusions, where the narrator finds himself in a summer drought that has transformed the land into a desert, who is referred to as the ‘Son of Man,’ with references to Ezekiel, and to the Gospels.
Four years ago [2015], the literary world marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the American-born English poet, playwright and literary critic, Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965). He was, perhaps the most important poet in the English language in the 20th century. And he is one of the greatest examples of how Anglican spirituality, Anglican liturgy, Anglican memory and Anglican history have been conveyed through the generations through the arts, particularly through poetry, drama and fiction.
The calendars of Anglican churches throughout the world recall the saintly memory of some of the great creative figures in Anglicanism over the generations.
For example, the calendar in
Common Worship commemorates the poets
George Herbert (27 February), Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy ‘Woodbine Willie’ (8 March), John Donne (31 March), Christina Rossetti (27 April) and John Keble (14 July), and writers like Julian of Norwich (8 May), Evelyn Underhill (15 June), John Bunyan (30 August) and Samuel Johnson (13 December).
To that list we might, perhaps, add writers such as
CS Lewis and Dorothy Sayers. Or if we were to think of writers who been conduits of Anglican spirituality and Anglican thinking we might think of
Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), author of the Chronicles of Barchester. Today, that tradition of Anglican writers who think theologically is continued by writers such as Susan Howatch and
Catherine Fox.
Is there an ‘Anglican culture’?
A mural by John Myatt on a wall in Bird Street, Lichfield commemorating Samuel Johnson (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Anglican culture has been expressed in architecture, poetry, literature, novels, and music.
Three years ago, each morning in Lent, I was meditating and blogging on thoughts from
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), who is often remembered as the compiler of his great
Dictionary, but forgotten as a spiritual writer.
In his last prayer, on 5 December 1784, before receiving Holy Communion and eight days before he died, Samuel Johnson prayed:
Almighty and most merciful Father, I am now, as to human eyes it seems, about to commemorate, for the last time, the death of thy Son Jesus Christ our Saviour and Redeemer. Grant, O Lord, that my whole hope and confidence may be in his merits, and his mercy; enforce an accept my imperfect repentance; make this commemoration available to the confirmation of my faith, the establishment of my hope, and the enlargement of my charity; and make the death of thy Son Jesus Christ effectual to my redemption. Have mercy on me, and pardon the multitude of my offences. Bless my friends; have mercy upon all men. Support me, by the grace of thy Holy Spirit, in the days of weakness, and at the hour of death; and receive me, at my death, to everlasting happiness, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Samuel Johnson’s statue in the Market Square, Lichfield (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Today, as we look at ‘Anglican Culture,’ I want to suggest that there is an ‘Anglican culture’ that conveys and carries through the generations an Anglican approach to spirituality and theology. For Anglican clergy or readers who are not cradle Anglicans, I believe it is important to be sensitive to this, to grasp this, but even more importantly to be enriched by this.
I want to look at this through the poetry and the writing of TS Eliot and John Betjeman, two of the greatest poets in the English language of the last century. Later, when we have all gone home, I plan to add an additional posting on ‘Anglican Culture’ seen through the eyes of one novelist and one novel in particular, Rose Macaulay (1881-1958) and her final novel and masterpiece,
The Towers of Trebizond (1956)
TS Eliot as an Anglican poet
The poem by TS Eliot (
right) that made his name as a poet,
The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock (1915), is regarded as a masterpiece of the modernist movement. It was followed by some of the best-known poems in English, including
The Waste Land (1922),
The Hollow Men (1925),
Ash Wednesday (1930), and the four poems in
Four Quartets (1943).
Of course, many of us may know him since our school days or childhood for
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), a collection of light verse that inspired
Cats (1981), the musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Eliot also wrote several plays, including
Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and
The Cocktail Party (1949), and he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.
Although he was born in the US, he became a British citizen in 1927 at the age of 39, a few months after his conversion to Anglicanism. When he renounced his US citizenship, he said: ‘My mind may be American but my heart is British.’
Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, the youngest child in a prominent Unitarian and academic family; his mother was a poet and social worker.
He began to write poetry at the age of 14 under the influence of Edward Fitzgerald’s
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, but he destroyed those early poems, and his oldest surviving poem dates from January 1905. He studied philosophy at Harvard (1906-1909), where the
Harvard Advocate published some of his poems.
After working as a philosophy assistant at Harvard (1909-1910), Eliot moved to Paris, where he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne (1910–1911), before returning to Harvard (1911-1914) to study Indian philosophy and Sanskrit. He then moved to Merton College, Oxford, but left after a year, commenting: ‘Oxford is very pretty, but I don’t like to be dead.’
By 1916, he had completed a PhD dissertation for Harvard on
Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of FH Bradley, but he never returned for his
viva voce examination.
Meanwhile, in 1915 he had been introduced to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, and they married within weeks. Their marriage was a catalyst in his writing
The Waste Land, and was the subject of the movie
Tom and Viv (1994).
24 Russell Square, where TS Eliot worked for Faber and Faber, is now part of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Eliot took up several teaching posts, including teaching at Highgate School, where his pupils included John Betjeman, and lecturing at Birkbeck College, London. By 1917, he was working at Lloyds Bank, and on a visit to Paris in 1920 he met James Joyce. But in 1925, Eliot joined the publishers Faber and Gwyer, later Faber and Faber, where he spent the rest of his career, eventually becoming a director.
On 29 June 1927, Eliot was baptised and confirmed an Anglican; a few months later he would become a British citizen. He became a churchwarden at Saint Stephen’s Church, Gloucester Road, London, and specifically identified with the Anglo-Catholic expression of Anglicanism, describing himself a ‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.’ Later, he would say his religious views combined ‘a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament.’
When he was offered the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard (1932-1933), he left his wife Vivienne in England. On his return, he filed for divorce, and she spent the rest of her life in a psychiatric hospital until her death in 1947.
Eliot first published his poems in periodicals, small books or pamphlets, and then collected them in books. His first collection was
Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). In 1920, he published more poems in
Ara Vos Prec (London) and
Poems: 1920 (New York).
In 1925, he collected
The Waste Land and the poems in
Prufrock and
Poems into one volume and added
The Hollow Men in
Poems: 1909-1925.
The Hollow Men was written when Eliot was going through difficult times in his work and with his first wife’s health. Writing about his earlier poem,
The Waste Land (1922), Eliot concluded that ‘some forms of illness are extremely favourable to religious illumination.’ This sets the background for the circumstances surrounding
The Hollow Men, which was written when Eliot was going through a wilderness experience.
From then on, Eliot updated this work as
Collected Poems.
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) is a collection of light verse.
Poems Written in Early Youth, posthumously published in 1967, is mainly poems published in
The Harvard Advocate (1907-1910).
Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 (1997) includes works he never intended to publish but that were published posthumously.
Although the main character in
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915) seems to be middle-aged, Eliot wrote most of the poem when he was only 22. It is well known for its opening lines, comparing the evening sky to ‘a patient etherised upon a table’ – an image that was considered shocking and offensive. The poem follows the conscious experience of Prufrock, lamenting his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life and his lack of spiritual progress.
In 1922, the same year as James Joyce published
Ulysses, Eliot published
The Waste Land at a time of personal difficulty: his marriage was failing, and both he and Vivienne were suffering from nervous disorders. The poem slips between satire and prophecy, and is marked by abrupt changes of speaker, location and time. Yet it is a touchstone of modern literature. Among its well-known phrases are: ‘April is the cruellest month,’ ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust,’ and the Sanskrit mantra that ends the poem: ‘Shantih, shantih, shantih.’
While earlier commentators tended to read ‘The Waste Land’ as a secular commentary on life in London in the inter-war years, more recent studies see in this poem a description of Eliot’s pilgrimage to faith from the Unitarianism of his childhood and youth, through his readings in Hinduism to his preparation for his eventual Baptism in 1927 and his subsequent, life-lasting Anglo-Catholicism.
In a study published two decades ago, A. Lee Fjordbotten, (‘Liturgical influences of Anglo-Catholicism on ‘The Waste Land’ and other works by TS Eliot,’ Fordham University, 1999), says ‘The Waste Land’ reveals a spiritually searching and developing Eliot who is anticipating his formal conversion in 1927. He points out that the structure of the poem is similar to the traditional process of conversion, especially as seen in the season of Lent.
In this way, the poem becomes the chronicle of Eliot’s own spiritual journey to conversion, and he analyses the five sections of ‘The Waste Land’ liturgically, in relation to the five Sundays of Lent and their respective themes, so that Part V, ‘What the Thunder says,’ relates to the Fifth Sunday in Lent and Passion Week in the calendar of the Church.
In a recent study of ‘The Waste Land,’ ‘The Prefiguration of TS Eliot’s conversion in ‘The Waste Land’,’ in the
Saint Austin Review (January/February 2012, pp 19-20), Paula L Gallagher says the beginning of Eliot’s conversion is prefigured in this poem and begins with his recognition of the emptiness of modernity.
She argues that the poem – far from being just the apogee of modernist despair – significantly prefigures his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism: ‘Eliot’s personal journey through the Waste Land – from the rejection of modernity, to the search for Christ, to the arrival of rain – contains imagery, allusions and ideas that prefigure that conversion to Anglo-Catholicism.’
Eliot’s major poem of the late 1920s,
The Hollow Men (1925), was written in the context of post-war Europe. It is deeply indebted to Dante and wrestles with the difficulty of hope and religious conversion, and with Eliot’s failed marriage. It concludes with some of Eliot’s best-known lines:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Not long before he reached the age of 40, Eliot made a decision that influenced his poetry and drama for the rest of his life. On the Feast of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, 27 June 1927, he was baptised and so began a life-long commitment to Anglo-Catholicism. Eliot was probably converted through reading the prayers and sermons of Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), Bishop of Winchester.
The tomb of Lancelot Andrewes in Southwark Cathedral … his prayers and sermons were critical in TS Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism and had an abiding influence on his writings (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
In his essay,
For Lancelot Andrewes: an Essay on Style and Order (1928), published the following year, Eliot argued that Andrewes’s sermons ‘rank with the finest English prose of their time, of any time.’ Eliot spoke of his indebtedness to the bishop’s writings: he is ‘the first great preacher of the English Catholic Church,’ he had ‘the voice of a man who had a formed visible church behind him, who spoke with the old authority and the new culture.’
For Eliot, ‘The intellectual achievement and the prose style of Hooker and Andrewes came to complete the structure of the English Church as the philosophy of the thirteenth century crowns the Catholic Church … the achievement of Hooker and Andrewes was to make the English Church more worthy of intellectual assent. No religion can survive the judgment of history unless the best minds of its time have collaborated in its construction; if the Church of Elizabeth is worthy of the age of Shakespeare and Jonson, that is because of the work of Hooker and Andrewes.
‘The writings of both Hooker and Andrewes illustrate that determination to stick to essentials, that awareness of the needs of the time, the desire for clarity and precision on matters of importance, and the indifference to matters indifferent, which was the general policy of Elizabeth … Andrewes is the first great preacher of the English Catholic Church.’
On the other hand, he was deeply disparaging when it came to John Donne:
‘About Donne there hangs the shadow of the impure motive; and impure motives lend their aid to a facile success. He is a little of the religious spellbinder, the Reverend Billy Sunday of his time, the flesh-creeper, the sorcerer of emotional orgy. We emphasize this aspect to the point of the grotesque. Donne had a trained mind; but without belittling the intensity or the profundity of his experience, we can suggest that this experience was not perfectly controlled, and that he lacked spiritual discipline.’
Eliot was influenced too by the monastic life of Nicholas Ferrar’s community at Little Gidding, and admired the works of Richard Hooker, George Herbert and Jeremy Taylor – and the churches of Christopher Wren.
Eliot’s writings after his baptism reflect how much an impression Andrewes’s sermons had made on him. His sermons on the Nativity were a special favourite of Eliot. His poem,
Journey of the Magi (1927), the first of the
Ariel Poems and written shortly after his baptism, begins with a direct quote from Andrewes’s sermon on the Epiphany at Christmas 1622. In that sermon, ‘Of the wise men come from the East,’ Andrewes opens with the words:
‘It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey in. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in
solstitio brumali, ‘the very dead of winter’.’
Eliot opens his
Journey of the Magi with similar words:
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
There are other references to Andrewes’s sermons in his poems. One phrase from Andrewes that figures in Eliot’s poetry – ‘Word without a word’ – occurs three times in Andrewes’s Nativity Sermons in which he refers to ‘the eternal Word’ as having always existed and the co-creator of the universe but now as a babe not ‘able to speak a word.’
Ash Wednesday marked TS Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism
Ash Wednesday (1930) was his first long poem after his conversion to Anglicanism in 1927, and has been described as Eliot’s conversion poem. It deals with the struggle that arises when one who has lacked faith acquires it, and with the aspiration to move from a spiritual barrenness to the hope for human salvation.
In
Ash Wednesday, Eliot took that ‘flashing phrase’ from Andrewes, ‘Word without a word,’ to highlight that the world still lives in darkness as the Word is still unheard:
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
O my people, what have I done unto thee.
In his sermons, Andrewes was critical of contemporaries who followed their own spirit rather than the Holy Spirit. He believed parish church is where the local community assembles to offer up their prayers and praises. Eliot lamented also that church community life no longer existed as families spent Sundays as a day off from religion, and so bells were no longer necessary in the city to summon people to church, as he expressed it in
Choruses from ‘The Rock’ (1934):
That the country now is only fit for picnics,
And the Church does not seem to be wanted
In country or in suburb.
The Four Quartets … regarded by TS Eliot as his masterpiece, led to him receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature
Eliot regarded the
Four Quartets as his masterpiece. This is the work that led to his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature. This is not one poem but four long poems, each published separately:
Burnt Norton (1936),
East Coker (1940),
The Dry Salvages (1941) and
Little Gidding (1942).
Each poem has five sections, each begins with a meditation or reflection on the place that gives the poem its title, and each meditates on the nature of time in a theological, historical or physical respect and its relation to the human condition. In addition, each poem is associated with one of the four classical elements, air, earth, water or fire.
Burnt Norton asks what it means to consider things that might have been:
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
A terrace of almshouses in East Coker … the village that inspired TS Eliot was his ancestral home and his ashes are buried at the parish church … ‘In my beginning is my end’
East Coker, the second of his
Four Quartets, is set in late November and ends: ‘In my end is my beginning.’
But it opens:
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation …
In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane …
…
Wait for the early owl.
‘Now the light falls … I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope.’ Dusk turns to darkness at Minister Pool in Lichfield (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Out of darkness, Eliot offers a solution in
East Coker:
Now the light fails … I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope.
East Coker … TS Eliot’s ancestral village in Somerset (Photograph: The Guardian)
The Dry Salvages treats the element of water, drawing on images of river and sea. It strives to contain opposites:
… the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled.
Julian of Norwich … All shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well
Little Gidding treats the element of fire, drawing on Eliot’s experiences as an air raid warden during the Blitz in London. This is the most anthologised of the
Four Quartets. In
Little Gidding, the
Four Quartets end with the well-known affirmation by Julian of Norwich:
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
‘To make an end is to make a beginning’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
In
Little Gidding, Eliot exposes the expression of the Catholic faith in Andrewes’s time. There are paradoxical lines that crystallise the significance of the Incarnation:
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
… A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.
The community at Little Gidding maintained 24 hours of prayer, including long hours of night vigils. Little Gidding was a place ‘where prayer has been valid’ and where ‘prayer is more/ than an order of words’:
… You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
The
Four Quartets must be understood within the framework of Christian thinking, tradition, and history. Eliot draws upon the theology, art, symbolism and language of such figures as Dante, and mystics like Saint John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich. The ‘deeper communion’ sought in East Coker, the ‘hints and whispers of children, the sickness that must grow worse in order to find healing,’ and the exploration that inevitably leads us home all point to the pilgrim’s path along the road of sanctification.
Eliot directed much of his creative energies after Ash Wednesday to writing plays. A pageant play,
The Rock (1934), was first performed to raise funds for churches in the Diocese of London.
A former Dean of Canterbury, Bishop George Bell (1883-1958) of Chichester, asked Eliot to write his best-known play,
Murder in the Cathedral (1935) for the Canterbury Festival in 1935. The play tells the story of the murder and martyrdom of Saint Thomas a Becket.
The Cocktail Party (1949) was Eliot’s modernising of
Alcestis by Euripides. Professor Guy Martin once offered a course at Harvard Divinity School on the writer as theologian, focussing on the poetry, prose and the plays of TS Eliot, examining the way he contributed to the relationship between religion and literature. As part of their final examination, the members of the class produced
The Cocktail Party.
Eliot was a member of a group that produced the report
Catholicity (1947) as a contribution to the process that resulted in the Church of England’s
Report on Doctrine (1948).
In 1958, Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher of Canterbury appointed Eliot to a commission that produced
The Revised Psalter (1963). Another member of the commission was CS Lewis, who had once been a harsh critic of Eliot. In 1935, Lewis wrote to a mutual friend that he considered Eliot’s work to be ‘a very great evil.’ However, during their time on that commission their antagonism turned to true friendship.
In 1957, at the age of 68, Eliot secretly married his second wife, Esmé Valerie Fletcher, then aged 32, who had been his secretary at Faber and Faber for almost eight years.
The wall plaque in Saint Michael’s Church, East Coker, Somerset, commemorating TS Eliot (Photograph: John Snelling)
Eliot died in London on 4 January 1965. His ashes were taken to Saint Michael’s Church in East Coker, the Somerset village from which his ancestors had emigrated to New England in the 17th century. A wall plaque in the church commemorates him with a quotation from his poem
East Coker:
In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.
He is also commemorated in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, where a stone quotes from
Little Gidding:
the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond
the language of the living.
Part 2: The poetry of John Betjeman
Sir John Betjeman … one of the great makers of the Christian imagination in the last century
Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984), who was Poet Laureate from 1972, once described himself in
Who’s Who as a ‘poet and hack.’ He had a passionate interest in Victorian architecture and in railways, and contributed to guide books as well as being a popular figure on television.
Betjeman was a troublesome poet who persisted in believing, and in his poetry he explored his thoughts about his Anglican faith, about Englishness and about Christianity in general. He remains one of the most significant literary figures of our time to declare his Christian faith, and one of the great makers of the Christian imagination in the last century.
In a letter written on Christmas Day 1947, he said: ‘Also my view of the world is that man is born to fulfil the purposes of his Creator i.e. to Praise his Creator, to stand in awe of Him and to dread Him. In this way I differ from most modern poets, who are agnostics and have an idea that Man is the centre of the Universe or is a helpless bubble blown about by uncontrolled forces.’
During his life, he crossed paths at different times with two other great Anglican literary giants: the poet TS Eliot, who was once his teacher, and the apologist CS Lewis, who was his tutor in Oxford.
He was a lifelong friend of the Irish poet Louis MacNeice, and he spent time in Dublin during World War II, when he was an active parishioner in Clondalkin, Co Dublin. Many of his poems recount his encounters members of the Church of Ireland and his love of Church of Ireland country parish churches.
Early life, Oxford and CS Lewis
Magdalen College, Oxford … John Betjeman was an undergraduate, and CS Lewis was his tutor (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)
He was born John Betjemann on 28 August 1906 in Highgate, and he was baptised in Saint Anne’s Church, Highgate Rise. Although his family was of Dutch ancestry, on the outbreak of World War I his parents, Mabel (née Dawson) and Ernest Betjemann, changed the family name to the less German-sounding Betjeman.
At Highgate School, his teachers included the poet TS Eliot. From there he went to the Dragon School, Oxford, and Marlborough College, Wiltshire, where his friends and contemporaries included the Irish poet Louis MacNeice, the spy Anthony Blunt, and the illustrator and cartoonist Graham Shepard.
At Marlborough too, his reading of the works of Arthur Machen (1863-1947) won him over to High Church Anglicanism – it was a conversion that would influence and shape his writing and his work in the arts for the rest of the life.
Betjeman entered Oxford with difficulty, having failed the mathematics part of the matriculation exam, and was admitted to Magdalen College. However, his tutor, CS Lewis, regarded him as an ‘idle prig,’ while Betjeman found Lewis unfriendly, demanding and uninspiring, describing him as being ‘breezy, tweedy, beer-drinking and jolly.’
Betjeman appears to have spent most of his time at Oxford indulging his social life, developing his interest in church architecture, and following his own literary pursuits. He had a poem published in Isis, the university magazine, and in 1927 was the editor of
Cherwell, the student newspaper whose contributors included WH Auden, Graham Greene, Cecil Day-Lewis and Evelyn Waugh.
But Betjeman never completed his degree at Oxford. He twice failed the compulsory Scripture examination, Divinity, known to students as ‘Divvers,’ and was later allowed to enter the Pass School. His tutor, CS Lewis, told the tutorial board he thought Betjeman would not achieve an honours degree of any class. Betjeman passed ‘Divvers’ at a third sitting, but finally left Oxford at the end of Michaelmas term 1928 after failing the Pass School.
For the rest of his life he blamed his failure on CS Lewis, and the two writers were never reconciled, even later in life. Nonetheless, Betjeman had an enduring love of Oxford, and received an honorary doctorate in 1974.
After Oxford, he worked briefly as a private secretary, schoolteacher and film critic for the
Evening Standard before becoming an assistant editor at the
Architectural Review. His first book of poems,
Mount Zion, was published in 1931 by an Oxford friend, Edward James.
Betjeman developed the
Shell Guides with Jack Beddington for Britain’s growing number of motorists. By the beginning of World War II, 13 Shell Guides had been published. Betjeman had written
Cornwall (1934) and
Devon (1936), and later he collaborated on
Shropshire (1951) with his friend the artist John Piper (1903-1992), whose works include the stained glass windows in Coventry Cathedral and the East Window in the chapel in Saint John’s Hospital, Lichfield.
Betjeman in Ireland
John Betjeman and family at Collinstown House, Clondalkin, Co Dublin, where they lived in the 1940s
Betjeman was rejected for active service in World War II but he moved to the Ministry of Information, and came to Dublin in 1941 as the British press attaché to the British High Commissioner, Sir John Maffey (later Lord Rugby), working from 50 Upper Merrion Street, Dublin.
From 1941 to 1943, the Betjemans lived at Collinstown House, Rowlagh, Clondalkin, where their daughter Candida was born. The Georgian house, which was rented from the Jameson distillery family, has since been demolished. John and Penelope Betjeman were registered vestry members in Saint John’s Church, where he regularly read the Sunday lessons.
He also had a close association with Monkstown Parish Church, Dublin, which he regarded as John Semple’s greatest work of architecture, displaying his ‘original genius’ and ‘eccentric taste.’ He said Monkstown Church was ‘one of my first favourites for its originality of detail and proportion.’
He also liked another Semple church, the now-closed Saint Mary’s in Saint Mary’s Place, near Dorset Street, known to generations of Dubliners as ‘the Black Church.’
In 1943, he gave a lecture to the clergy of the Church of Ireland, ‘Fabrics of the Church of Ireland,’ in which he made the point that the ‘fabric of the church is very much concerned with worship. The decoration of a church can lead the eye to God or away from him.’
As press attaché, his roles in Dublin included smoothing relations between Britain and the neutral Irish Free State, contributing to radio programmes such as
Irish Half Hour aimed at Irish recruits in the British army, and entertaining important British visitors, including the actor Laurence Olivier, who was filming his production of Shakespeare’s
Henry V on the Powerscourt Estate at Enniskerry, Co Wicklow.
According to documents unearthed by a recent Channel 4 documentary, Betjeman told Whitehall that the only way to lure Ireland into the war was to end partition. He said a ‘defensive union of the whole of Ireland’ should be made ‘indissoluble,’ he urged Britain to stop attacking the Irish Free State, including ‘anti-Irish articles and cartoons,’ and he argued that “de Valera is Britain’s best friend in Ireland.”
Betjeman’s main sources of information included the journalists of
The Irish Times he drank with in the Palace Bar in Fleet Street.
It is said the IRA planned to assassinate him, but the order was rescinded after he met an Old IRA man who was impressed by his works.
Betjeman wrote a number of poems based on his experiences in Ireland during the ‘Emergency,’ including ‘The Irish Unionist’s Farewell to Greta Hellstrom in 1922,’ which includes the refrain ‘Dungarvan in the rain.’ ‘Greta’ was recently identified as Emily (Sears) Villiers-Stuart, an American married into a well-known West Waterford landed family.
In Dublin, he also became friends with Patrick Kavanagh. The Irish poet celebrated the birth of Betjeman’s daughter with his poem ‘Candida,’ and another well-known poem contains the line: ‘Let John Betjeman call for me in a car.’
When Betjeman’s posting in Dublin ended in 1943, his departure made the front page of
The Irish Times. After World War II, he returned to London, his wife Penelope became a Roman Catholic in 1948, and the couple drifted apart. He later developed a close, life-long friendship with Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, whose family lived in Lismore Castle, Co Waterford.
Poet Laureate and popular poet
By 1948, Betjeman had published more than a dozen books, including five verse collections, and by 1958 sales of his
Collected Poems had reached 100,000; it has now sold over two million copies. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1972, and this role, along with his popularity on television, brought his poetry to a wider audience.
He voiced the thoughts and aspirations of many ordinary people while retaining the respect of many of his fellow poets. He died at his home in Trebetherick, Cornwall, on 19 May 1984, and is buried at Saint Enodoc’s Church.
Betjeman and Church architecture
Betjeman had a love of Victorian architecture and was a founding member of the Victorian Society. But he also loved old Church of Ireland country parish churches. In ‘Ireland with Emily,’ he writes of those parish churches in rural Kildare, Roscommon, Westmeath and Laois, first published in
New Bats in Old Belfries (1945):
There in pinnacled protection,
One extinguished family waits
A Church of Ireland resurrection
By the broken, rusty gates.
Sheepswool, straw and droppings cover,
Graves of spinster, rake and lover,
Whose fantastic mausoleum
Sings its own seablown Te Deum
In and out the slipping slates.
His favourite church in Ireland was the Church of Ireland parish church in Monkstown, Co Dublin. This church was originally built in 1789, but was remodelled in 1830 by John Semple. In 1974, Betjeman became the first patron of the Friends of Monkstown Church, corresponding regularly with the rector, Canon William Wynne. The church also featured in a BBC documentary, Betjeman’s Dublin.
Betjeman’s poetry and his faith
Betjeman’s poems are often humorous, and his wryly comic verse is marked by a satirical and observant grace. As WH Auden observed, he was ‘at home with the provincial gas-lit towns, the seaside lodgings, the bicycle, the harmonium.’
His poetry is redolent of time and place, continually seeking out intimations of the eternal in the manifestly ordinary. In a 1962 radio interview, he explained that he could not write about ‘abstract things,’ preferring places and faces.
Betjeman was a troublesome poet who persisted in believing, and in his poetry he explored his thoughts about his Anglican faith, about Englishness and about Christianity in general.
He remains one of the most significant literary figures of our time to declare his Christian faith. In a letter written on Christmas Day 1947, he said: ‘Also my view of the world is that man is born to fulfil the purposes of his Creator i.e. to Praise his Creator, to stand in awe of Him and to dread Him. In this way I differ from most modern poets, who are agnostics and have an idea that Man is the centre of the Universe or is a helpless bubble blown about by uncontrolled forces.’
He was a practising Anglican and his religious beliefs and piety inform many of his poems. In response to a radio broadcast by the humanist Margaret Knight, he expressed his views on Christianity in
The Listener in 1955 with his poem ‘The Conversion of St. Paul’:
Now is the time when we recall
The sharp Conversion of Saint Paul
Converted! Turned the wrong way round –
A man who seemed till then quite sound,
Keen on religion – very keen –
No one, it seems, had ever been
So keen on persecuting those
Who said that Christ was God and chose
To die for this absurd belief
As Christ had died beside the thief.
Then in a sudden blinding light
Paul knew that Christ was God alright –
And very promptly lost his sight.
Poor Paul! They led him by the hand
He who had been so high and grand
A helpless blunderer, fasting, waiting,
Three days inside himself debating
In physical blindness: “As it’s true
That Christ is God and died for you,
Remember all the things he did
To keep His gospel message hid.
Remember how you helped them even
To throw the stones that murdered Stephen.
And do you think that you are strong
Enough to own that you were wrong?”
They must have been an awful time,
Those three long days repenting crime
Till Ananias came and Paul
Received his sight, and more than all
His former strength, and was baptised.
Saint Paul is often criticised
By modern people who’re annoyed
At his conversion, saying Freud
Explains it all. But they omit
The really vital point of it,
Which isn’t how it was achieved
But what it was that Paul believed.
He knew as certainly as we
Know you are you and I am me
That Christ was all He claimed to be.
What is conversion? Turning round
From chaos to a love profound.
And chaos too is an abyss
In which the only life is this.
Such a belief is quite alright
If you are like Mrs Knight
And think morality will do
For all the ills we’re subject to.
But raise your eyes and see with Paul
An explanation of it all.
Injustice, cancer’s cruel pain,
All suffering that seems in vain,
The vastness of the universe,
Creatures like centipedes and worse –
All part of an enormous plan
Which mortal eyes can never scan
And out of it came God to man.
Jesus is God and came to show
The world we live in here below
Is just an antechamber where
We for His Father’s house prepare.
What is conversion? Not at all
For me the experience of St Paul,
No blinding light, a fitful glow
Is all the light of faith I know
Which sometimes goes completely out
And leaves me plunging into doubt
Until I will myself to go
And worship in God’s house below —
My parish church — and even there
I find distractions everywhere.
What is Conversion? Turning round
To gaze upon a love profound.
For some of us see Jesus plain
And never once look back again,
And some of us have seen and known
And turned and gone away alone,
But most of us turn slow to see
The figure hanging on a tree
And stumble on and blindly grope
Upheld by intermittent hope.
God grant before we die we all
May see the light as did St Paul.
The Mystery of Faith in four poems
Betjeman was a life-long Anglo-Catholic. In four poems – ‘Churchyards,’ ‘Advent 1955,’ ‘Christmas’ and ‘Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican’ – Betjeman makes the mystery of the Christian faith a central issue.
Professor Kevin J Gardner of Baylor University, in
Faith and Doubt of John Betjeman: An Anthology of Betjeman’s Religious Verse (London: Continuum, 2006), says that in these four poems Betjeman finds the sudden and wondrous appearance of God in the most unlikely of places, giving him ‘a sense of spiritual security’ that ‘renders him susceptible to the embrace of mystery and miracle.’
1, Churchyards
‘For churchyards then, though hollowed ground, / Were not so grim as now they sound’ … the ‘saddleback’ grave in Saint Michael’s Churchyard, Lichfield (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Although it is one of his less-known poems, ‘Churchyards’ is one of the four poems – alongside ‘Advent 1955,’ ‘Christmas,’ and ‘Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican,’ and– in which Betjeman makes the mystery of the Christian faith a central issue.
Now when the weather starts to clear
How fresh the primrose clumps appear,
Those shining pools of springtime flower
In our churchyard. And on the tower
We see the sharp spring sunlight thrown
On all its sparkling rainwashed stone,
That tower, so built to take the light
Of sun by day and moon by night,
that centuries of weather there
Have mellowed it twice as fair
As when it first rose new and hard
Above the sports in our churchyard.
For churchyards then, though hollowed ground,
Were not so grim as now they sound,
And horns of ale were handed round,
For which churchwardens used to pay,
On each especial vestry day.
’Twas thus the village drunk its beer,
With its relations buried near,
And that is why we often see
Inns where the alehouse used to be
Close to the church when prayers were said,
And Masses for the village dead.
But in these latter days we’ve grown
To think that the memorial stone
Is quite enough for soul and clay
Until the Resurrection day.
Perhaps it is. It’s not for me
To argue on theology.
But this I know, you’re sure to find
Some headstones of the Georgian kind
In each old churchyard near and far,
Just go and see how fine they are.
Notice the lettering of that age
Spaced like a noble title-page,
The parish names cut deep and strong
To hold the shades of evening long,
The quaint and sometimes touching rhymes
By parish poets of the times,
Bellows, or reaping hook or spade
To show, perhaps, the dead man’s trade,
And cherubs in the corner spaces
With wings and English ploughboy faces.
Engraved on slate and carved in stone,
These Georgian headstones hold their own
With craftsmanship of earlier days
Men gave in their Creator’s praise.
More homely are they than the white
Italian marbles which were quite
The rage in Good King Edward’s reign,
With ugly lettering, hard and plain.
Our churches are our history shown
In wood and glass and iron and stone.
I hate to see in old churchyards
Tombstones stacked like playing cards
Along the wall which then encloses
A trim new lawn and standard roses,
Bird-baths and objects such as fill a
Garden in some suburban villa
The Bishop comes; the bird-bath’s blessed,
Our churchyard’s now a ‘garden of rest’.
And so it may be, all the same
Graveyard’s a much more honest name.
Oh why do people waste their breath
Inventing dainty names for death?
On the old tombstones of the past
We do not read ‘At peace at last’
But simply ‘died’ or plain ‘departed’.
We die; that’s that; our flesh decays
Or disappears in other ways.
But since we’re Christians, we believe
That we new bodies will receive
To clothe our souls for us to meet
Our Maker at His Judgement Seat.
And this belief’s a gift of faith
And, if it’s true, no end is death.
Mid-Lent is passed and Easter’s near
The greatest day of all the year
When Jesus, who indeed had died,
Rose with his body glorified.
And if you find believing hard
The primroses in your churchyard
And modern science too will show
That all things change the while they grow,
And we, who change in Time will be
Still more changed in eternity.
2, Advent 1955
‘A present that cannot be priced / Given two thousand years ago’ … the Christmas scene seen in a stained-glass window in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
In the second of these poems, ‘Advent 1955,’ Betjeman talks about how people today take the real meaning of Christmas for granted. No one seems to appreciate the real gift anymore. Yet this is God’s gift, the greatest gift of all, the birth of Christ.
The Advent wind begins to stir
With sea-like sounds in our Scotch fir,
It’s dark at breakfast, dark at tea,
And in between we only see
Clouds hurrying across the sky
And rain-wet roads the wind blows dry
And branches bending to the gale
Against great skies all silver pale
The world seems travelling into space,
And travelling at a faster pace
Than in the leisured summer weather
When we and it sit out together,
For now we feel the world spin round
On some momentous journey bound –
Journey to what? to whom? to where?
The Advent bells call out ‘Prepare,
Your world is journeying to the birth
Of God made Man for us on earth.’
And how, in fact, do we prepare
The great day that waits us there –
For the twenty-fifth day of December,
The birth of Christ? For some it means
An interchange of hunting scenes
On coloured cards, And I remember
Last year I sent out twenty yards,
Laid end to end, of Christmas cards
To people that I scarcely know –
They'd sent a card to me, and so
I had to send one back. Oh dear!
Is this a form of Christmas cheer?
Or is it, which is less surprising,
My pride gone in for advertising?
The only cards that really count
Are that extremely small amount
From real friends who keep in touch
And are not rich but love us much
Some ways indeed are very odd
By which we hail the birth of God.
We raise the price of things in shops,
We give plain boxes fancy tops
And lines which traders cannot sell
Thus parcell’d go extremely well
We dole out bribes we call a present
To those to whom we must be pleasant
For business reasons. Our defence is
These bribes are charged against expenses
And bring relief in Income Tax
Enough of these unworthy cracks!
‘The time draws near the birth of Christ’.
A present that cannot be priced
Given two thousand years ago
Yet if God had not given so
He still would be a distant stranger
And not the Baby in the manger.
3, Christmas
‘Provincial Public Houses blaze’ … an open fire in the Moat House, Tamworth (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
The third of these four poems, ‘Christmas,’ is one of Betjeman’s most openly religious pieces, in which the last three stanzas proclaim the wonder of Christ’s birth in the form of a question: ‘And is it true…?’
The bells of waiting Advent ring,
The Tortoise stove is lit again
And lamp-oil light across the night
Has caught the streaks of winter rain
In many a stained-glass window sheen
From Crimson Lake to Hookers Green.
The holly in the windy hedge
And round the Manor House the yew
Will soon be stripped to deck the ledge,
The altar, font and arch and pew,
So that the villagers can say
‘The church looks nice’ on Christmas Day.
Provincial Public Houses blaze,
Corporation tramcars clang,
On lighted tenements I gaze,
Where paper decorations hang,
And bunting in the red Town Hall
Says ‘Merry Christmas to you all’.
And London shops on Christmas Eve
Are strung with silver bells and flowers
As hurrying clerks the City leave
To pigeon-haunted classic towers,
And marbled clouds go scudding by
The many-steepled London sky.
And girls in slacks remember Dad,
And oafish louts remember Mum,
And sleepless children’s hearts are glad.
And Christmas-morning bells say ‘Come!’
Even to shining ones who dwell
Safe in the Dorchester Hotel.
And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,
A Baby in an ox’s stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?
And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,
No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare –
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.
4, Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican
‘The angel choir must pause in song / When she kneels at the altar rail’ … an angel figure in the Grosvenor Chapel, in South Audley Street in the heart of Mayfair in London
His poem ‘Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican,’ is another of the four poems – alongside ‘Churchyards,’ ‘Advent 1955,’ and ‘Christmas’ – in which Betjeman makes the mystery of the Christian faith a central issue.
If Betjeman’s imagination wanders in the joys of the beauty of worship and church architecture in ‘Sunday Morning, King’s Cambridge,’ then his mind wanders in the joys of beauty in a very different way in ‘Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican’ – although he reaches similar conclusions.
‘Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican’ – which in Betjeman’s drafts is titled ‘Lenten Thoughts in Grosvenor Chapel’ – was the first spontaneous poem he wrote after his appointment as Poet Laureate in October 1972. It was first published in the
Sunday Express on 13 May 1973, and was included in the collection
A Nip in the Air (1974).
Alongside the joviality found in many of his poems, this poem has an unusual tonal complexity. Betjeman describes a mysterious and sexually alluring woman who receives Holy Communion each Sunday. In an attempt to refocus the devotional attention of the parishioners, the priest tells them not to stare around or to be distracted during his celebration of the Eucharist.
But Betjeman’s experience contradicts the admonitions from the priest. In a peculiar way, through this mysterious and alluring woman, he suddenly becomes aware of the presence of God. The intrigue and arousal surrounding the women he describes as the “mistress” speaks to the poet of the mystery of God.
Betjeman told Tom Driberg that ‘this [poem] is about a lady I see but have never spoken to, in a London church.’ The church was the Grosvenor Chapel in South Audley Street in the heart of Mayfair in London.
From 1972 until his death in 1984, Betjeman worshipped at the Grosvenor Chapel, which had been redesigned and transformed, with an Anglo-Catholic emphasis, in 1912 by Sir Ninian Comper in 1912. It was a favourite church of Bishop Charles Gore, and for many years the congregation included such people as the writer Rose Macaulay, author of
The Towers of Trebizond.
In an interview with the
Sunday Express, Betjeman said: ‘I saw this woman in church one Sunday. I didn’t know who she was. She was the most beautiful creature; and she had a slightly sad expression. And I didn’t even know her name – but it was probably all the better for that. She might have been terrible.’
‘I like there to be a mystery between me and my beloved,’ he continued. ‘And I don’t think there was anything wrong with looking at her in church, do you? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with loving the beauty of the human figure whether it’s in church or in the street … I’m not sure if [the poem] is any good but I hope it will please people. I’ve always wanted my verse to be popular because I wanted to communicate.’
A week later, on 20 May 1973, the
Sunday Express published a parody reply, ‘With apologies to a charming poet,’ written by Frank Hayward, in the name of the husband of the woman in question.
Betjeman’s Dublin-born daughter, the author and journalist Candida Lycett Green, has identified the woman who inspired this poem as Joan Price, who used to go to church at Betjeman’s church, the Grosvenor Chapel. She was the Beauty Editor of
Harpers & Queen – now
Harper’s Bazaar – and was married to Michael Constantinidis, a sidesman at the Grosvenor Chapel.
The poem was also parodied in
Private Eye with these lines:
Lovely lady in the pew,
Goodness, what a scorcher – phew!
What I wouldn’t give to do
Unmentionable things to you.
Isn’t she lovely, “the Mistress”?
With her wide-apart grey-green eyes,
The droop of her lips and, when she smiles,
Her glance of amused surprise?
How nonchalantly she wears her clothes,
How expensive they are as well!
And the sound of her voice is as soft and deep
As the Christ Church tenor bell.
But why do I call her “the Mistress”
Who know not her way of life?
Because she has more of a cared-for air
Than many a legal wife.
How elegantly she swings along
In the vapoury incense veil;
The angel choir must pause in song
When she kneels at the altar rail.
The parson said that we shouldn’t stare
Around when we come to church,
Or the Unknown God we are seeking
May forever elude our search.
But I hope that the preacher will not think
It unorthodox and odd
If I add that I glimpse in “the Mistress”
A hint of the Unknown God.
Two important places of Anglican worship
Betjeman celebrates the social and cultural significance of the Church of England, yet he points to the social and spiritual failures of the Church, particularly the snobbery and hypocrisy of the clergy and churchgoers.
Two of his poems, ‘In Westminster Abbey’ (1940) and ‘Sunday Morning, King’s Cambridge’ (1954), are set in two of the most important centres of worship in England, one with political significance, the other with academic significance.
Taken together, these two poems give us a poet who believes deeply in Christ and who holds out hope for the Church of England and Anglicanism. One represents a place of public worship the closely links the Church with the political power in the nation; the other represents the very beauty of Anglican worship in a place associated not only with the academic, architectural and musical excellence of the nation.
1, In Westminster Abbey
‘Now I’ll come to Evening Service / Whensoever I have the time’ … ‘In Westminster Abbey’ is one of John Betjeman’s most savage satires (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
‘In Westminster Abbey’ is one of Betjeman’s most savage satires. This poem is a dramatic monologue, set during the early days of World War II, in which a woman enters Westminster Abbey to pray for a moment before hurrying off to ‘a luncheon date.’
She is not merely a chauvinistic nationalist, but also a racist, a snob and a hypocrite who is concerned more with how the war will affect her share portfolio than anything else. Her chauvinistic nationalism leads her speaker to pray to God ‘to bomb the Germans’ … but ‘Don’t let anyone bomb me.’ But her social and ethical lapses are a product of her spiritual state, which is a direct result of her nation’s spiritual sickness.
Let me take this other glove off
As the
vox humana swells,
And the beauteous fields of Eden
Bask beneath the Abbey bells.
Here, where England’s statesmen lie,
Listen to a lady’s cry.
Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans,
Spare their women for Thy Sake,
And if that is not too easy
We will pardon Thy Mistake.
But, gracious Lord, whate’er shall be,
Don’t let anyone bomb me.
Keep our Empire undismembered
Guide our Forces by Thy Hand,
Gallant blacks from far Jamaica,
Honduras and Togoland;
Protect them Lord in all their fights,
And, even more, protect the whites.
Think of what our Nation stands for,
Books from Boots’ and country lanes,
Free speech, free passes, class distinction,
Democracy and proper drains.
Lord, put beneath Thy special care
One-eighty-nine Cadogan Square.
Although dear Lord I am a sinner,
I have done no major crime;
Now I’ll come to Evening Service
Whensoever I have the time.
So, Lord, reserve for me a crown,
And do not let my shares go down.
I will labour for Thy Kingdom,
Help our lads to win the war,
Send white feathers to the cowards
Join the Women’s Army Corps,
Then wash the steps around Thy Throne
In the Eternal Safety Zone.
Now I feel a little better,
What a treat to hear Thy Word,
Where the bones of leading statesmen
Have so often been interr’d.
And now, dear Lord, I cannot wait
Because I have a luncheon date.
2, Sunday Morning, King’s Cambridge
A Sunday morning at King’s College, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Some years ago, in a book review in the
Times Higher Education Supplement, Timothy Mowl of the University of Bristol described ‘Sunday Morning, King’s Cambridge’ as the ‘least important’ of Betjeman’s poems, ‘because it is about a place, not people in a place.’
But here, perhaps, he is at his best as he fuses together in one poem his different passions, and in ‘Sunday Morning, King’s Cambridge’ he presents a happy marriage of architectural detail, finely observed, and the sense of the worship of the eternal captured in a moment. He presents the beauty and splendour of Anglican worship, ablaze with colour.
In ‘Sunday Morning, King’s Cambridge,’ the moment of worship exists out of time as the living and the dead, the choir and the poet, join in the eternal praise of God. In this poem, Betjeman captures a joyful and spontaneous reaction, albeit an emotionally restrained expression, and a sense of wonder in the celebration of Anglican worship.
Stanza 1 describes the procession of the choir of the Chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, and the spiritually overwhelming aesthetics of the chapel – the stalls, the stained glass, and especially the stunning fan-vaulted ceiling, ‘a shower that never falls.’
Stanza 2 sees the poet’s mind wander away from the service as he imagines being outside among the ‘windy Cambridge courts.’ Again there is a great emphasis on the vast variety of colour, but all the colours are transformed into ‘waves of pearly light’ reflected off the Cambridge stone. The image suggests that the divine is not to be found exclusively in the chapel but in the world, the space that contains both God’s works and humanity’s work.
Stanza 3 is a geographical and historical expansion of these images and ideas. Here, the white of the ‘windy Cambridge courts’ contrasts with the ‘vaulted roof so white and light and strong.’
Betjeman imagines the tombs that fill churches throughout East Anglia, with the effigies of the deceased captured for eternity in postures of prayer:
… the clasped hands lying long
Recumbent on sepulchral slabs or effigied in brass.
The prayers of these dead are a ‘buttress’ for the vaulted ceiling of the chapel at King’s, which, built near the end of the Gothic period, needs no architectural buttresses. Christianity exists not because of aesthetics but because of prayer, and the sanctuary is supported, not because of the marvels of 15th century engineering, but by a tradition of faith. In ‘Sunday Morning, King’s Cambridge,’ the moment of worship exists out of time as the living and the dead, the choir and the poet, join in the eternal praise of God.
The poem has no irony, except perhaps in the last line:
To praise Eternity contained in Time and coloured glass.
Here Betjeman illustrates the futility of our human desire to share in God’s timelessness. All of us are being confounded by our foolish need to control God and time.
File into yellow candle light, fair choristers of King’s
Lost in the shadowy silence of canopied Renaissance stalls
In blazing glass above the dark glow skies and thrones and wings
Blue, ruby, gold and green between the whiteness of the walls
And with what rich precision the stonework soars and springs
To fountain out a spreading vault – a shower that never falls.
The white of windy Cambridge courts, the cobbles brown and dry,
The gold of plaster Gothic with ivy overgrown,
The apple-red, the silver fronts, the wide green flats and high,
The yellowing elm-trees circled out on islands of their own –
Oh, here behold all colours change that catch the flying sky
To waves of pearly light that heave along the shafted stone.
In far East Anglian churches, the clasped hands lying long
Recumbent on sepulchral slabs or effigied in brass
Buttress with prayer this vaulted roof so white and light and strong
And countless congregations as the generations pass
Join choir and great crowned organ case, in centuries of song
To praise Eternity contained in Time and coloured glass.
A final poem: Loneliness
‘The last year’s leaves are on the beech … The Easter bells enlarge the sky,’ John Betjeman (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
The chilling poem ‘Loneliness’ is from Betjeman’s 1974 collection,
A Nip in the Air, and while it speaks of how ‘The Easter bells enlarge the sky,’ it shows Betjeman’s deep fear of death.
He suffered nightmares about Hell because he was married to one woman (Penelope Chetwode) but was living with another (Lady Elizabeth Cavendish).
The last year’s leaves are on the beech:
The twigs are black; the cold is dry;
To deeps beyond the deepest reach
The Easter bells enlarge the sky.
O ordered metal clatter-clang!
Is yours the song the angels sang?
You fill my heart with joy and grief –
Belief! Belief! And unbelief…
And, though you tell me I shall die,
You say not how or when or why.
Indifferent the finches sing,
Unheeding roll the lorries past:
What misery will this year bring
Now spring is in the air at last?
For, sure as blackthorn bursts to snow,
Cancer in some of us will grow,
The tasteful crematorium door
Shuts out for some the furnace roar;
But church-bells open on the blast
Our loneliness, so long and vast.
Some commentators say that towards the end of his life his belief in God waxed and waned. In ‘On a Portrait of a Deaf Man,’ written after his father’s death, he writes:
You, God, who treat him thus and thus,
Say ‘Save his soul and pray.’
You ask me to believe You and
I only see decay.
Here, however, the poet Hugo Williams hears Betjeman speaking frankly to God: ‘If he has a well-developed sense of his mortality it is no more than any poet needs to make poetry out of.’ Betjeman’s religious values come through in his poems, and he affirms his belief even while fearing it might be false.
Betjeman celebrates the social and cultural significance of the Church of England, yet he points to the social and spiritual failures of the Church, particularly the snobbery and hypocrisy of the clergy and churchgoers.
In his poems, Betjeman describes the perils of faith and the struggle to believe. He was a troublesome poet who persisted in believing, and in his poetry he explored his thoughts about his Anglican faith, about Englishness and about Christianity in general.
Further Reading:
John Betjeman,
The Best of Betjeman, ed John Guest (London: John Murray, 1978/2006).
John Betjeman,
Collected Poems, with an introduction by Andrew Motion (London: John Murray, 1955/2006).
John Betjeman,
Poems selected by Hugo Williams (London: Faber and Faber, 2006).
Kevin J Gardner,
Faith and Doubt of John Betjeman: An Anthology of Betjeman’s verse (London: Continuum, 2006).
Poems by John Betjeman © John Betjeman Society.
Two delightful finds on a second-hand book stall on a recent Sunday afternoon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Next:
3: Rose Macaulay and The Towers of Trebizond
(Revd Canon Professor) Patrick Comerford is Director of Education and Training in the Diocese of Limerick and Killaloe. These notes were prepared for a workshop on 13 May 2019 with clergy and readers in Saint Mary’s Rectory, Askeaton.
Pentecost (El Greco) … ‘When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf’ (John 15: 26)
