John Betjeman : No Teddy Bear.

I have just been reading John Betjeman's poems again. I have always quietly liked them since first being introduced to them. The lines 'Up the ash tree climbs the ivy, Up the ivy climbs the sun' that open ' Upper Lambourne ' still resonate in my mind as does a line about ' squelching bladderwrack' which I cannot find in my copy of the collected poems. Its a seaweed, by the way, he is walking on the shore somewhere in England.

His image as the square somewhat lacking in angst tweedy fuddy duddy is not born out by his very subtle and deceptively simple poetry. TS Eliot said contemporary poetry must be ' difficult.' Its funny, they were pretty much contemporary yet Eliot seems the more modern and ' challenging.' Yet one does not have to go far into Betjeman's poems to find some remarkably unsettling and almost chillingly bleak visions, all the more so for being couched in the everyday and managing to completely avoid pomposity or the making of the big statement.

Read 'NW5 & N6' , suicide, mortality and religious doubt, fear, all occur with grim yet almost casual insistence in this and other poems. Additionally there are the vehement and unadulterated cries against the horrors of the increasing intrusion and de-civilising effect of technology, cars in particular. This, the last verse from ' Inexpensive Progress ' :

When all our roads are lighted

By concrete monsters sited

Like gallows overhead,

Bathed in the yellow vomit

Each monster belches from it,

We'll know that we are dead.

Not obviously John Betjeman, more like John Lydon.

He is also excellent in dropping pieces of conversation, not highbrow stuff, into the poems and with a much more convincing touch than Eliot, who did the same, but far more self-consciously and with ' deeper meaning' so they say...

I wonder who did it first ? It is usually assumed that Eliot was the avant-garde but I wonder ? He was also American and often his apparently English imagery and persona does not quite ring true. He was also a banker and published his own work as the editor at Faber & Faber.

Here are the last lines from ' NW5 & N6 ' :

" World without end " What fearsome words to pray.

" World without end." It was not what she'ld do

That frightened me so much as did her fear

And guilt at endlessness. I caught them too,

Hating to think of sphere succeeding sphere

Into eternity and god's dread will.

I caught her terror then. I have it still.