Memory And Poetic Form In John Betjeman`s Poetry - Part 1

The technical sophistication of John Betjeman's poetry is rarely analysed. This is perhaps because Betjeman is not intrinsically associated with any major twentieth century literary movement. His work's phenomenal popular success is typically attributed to a combination of his public persona, his poetry's use of superficially appealing, lyrical forms, and the 'accessibility' and often light, humorous tone of both his subject matter and language - the traits of a 'rhymester' , as A. N. Wilson describes this common critical view of him. Essentially, his poetry is perceived merely to have fortuitously answered to a gap in a market dominated by esoteric Modernists. His output is not generally reckoned to amount to a major contribution to verse tradition, as where it is original it is considered to be simplistic (and by extension crude), and where it is complex, it is held to be derivative. His subtlety is often overlooked because of his work's perceived superficial simplicity.

To a considerable extent, this is a result of the fact that his poetry tends to be markedly traditional in form, and that his career as a published poet began, in 1932 , against the backdrop of an advanced stage of the development and dissemination of the principles of what can broadly be referred to as Modernism, a movement of which the published poetic products were, in form, overtly original in their stark and unprecedented contrasts to the bulk of poetry published before Modernism's explosion, around the time of the 1915 publication of T. S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.

When that poem was published, it rebelled against the existing conventions of Georgian poetry, as did the new poetry following it that pursued many of the conceptual avenues it opened. The most apparent manifestations of this were its fragmented metrical forms, its incongruous imagery and its disjointed narrative progressions. A classic example, from 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' is:

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table

Betjeman's verse lacked these qualities, drawing instead once again upon Georgian and Victorian conventions for its forms, and the traditions (for example, the Romantic), which those themselves drew upon. In general, his verse adopts more traditional approaches to form and structure, and uses explicit narrative technique which has proved a more populist methodology. The Modernists were, necessarily, more esoteric. Betjeman's approach emphasises automatic comprehensibility and distinguishes him from the Modernists' with, modernistic verse's 'problems of compre-hension' as Hugo Williams puts it . Of course, poetic Modernism is a broad term, and potentially refers to many, diverse writers, and a broad range of ideas, though it essentially refers to the poetry born of those 'rebellious' innovations of the early twentieth century. Many poets referred to as Modernists maintain attitudes towards poetry which are contradictory to or divergent from other 'Modernists'. Indeed, in many ways, Betjeman could be considered a 'Modernist' in several aspects of his poetry - there is a form of narrative fragmentism in poems like 'The Flight from Bootle' ('Alice will not have a rough time / Nor be quite the same again') and disjuncture of narrative and speaker in poems like 'Narcissus' . One of the hallmarks of his verse is an Eliot-esque use of the objective correlative, in the use of surprising, seemingly tangential, imagery to articulate an evocation, yielding multi-layered conceits: Prufrock has 'measured out his life in coffee spoons'. The residents of Betjeman's 'Slough' have 'tinned milk, tinned, beans, tinned minds, tinned breath'. Betjeman is a more innovative poet than is normally acknowledged.

Williams also states that Betjeman 'stopped admiring the problematical stuff that stood beyond the average reader`s unassisted critical appraisal and turned his head towards the harder, unprotected world of ordinary excellence.' The depth of substance and breadth of achievement in his work tends to be disguised by two features of it: its accessibility invites the wrongful conclusion that it is aesthetically simplistic and un-ambitious; and its rich reference to English history and literary traditions as subject matter for his poems, invites the assumption that he is backward-looking in his overall approach to versification. This is a skewed perspective.

Betjeman focused positively on the Victorian era in many of his poems, referring frequently to Victorian architecture (in 'Hymn' , for example), and nostalgically invoking Victorian social and religious values (in poems like 'Thoughts on The Diary of a Nobody' ), and deploying in some of his poems the habits of Victorian poets like Newbolt, with, for instance, contraction and elision in poems like 'Death in Leamington' (for example - 'by the light of the ev'ning star' and 'high 'mid the stands and chairs'), also deploying the verse shape and rhythms associated with popular Victorian poetry, as well as prevalent linguistic habits of the era: 'Murray, you bid my plastic pen / A preface write' . (In this line, however, from 'Preface to High and Low', is a typical example of Betjeman's light touch in deployment of these techniques, combining Victorian technique with details of modernity, the plastic pen, creating the playful tension between past and present.) The nineteenth century was a period against which Modernism was something of a backlash. Hence, because of these aspects distinguishing Betjeman's verse from the actively and overtly progressive Modernist movement, it is prone to misinterpretation as necessarily being conversely regressive. As will become clear, Betjeman does not truly align himself with a specific verse tradition but deploys techniques and tropes from a diverse range of traditions and conventions, as well as engineering his own, simply to achieve the specific effects each poem requires.

And it is often inferred that Betjeman's principles, or orientations, as a poet are in opposition to the Modernists - that the manner in which he locates himself in certain literary traditions is retrograde in relation to their desired thread of artistic progression. Furthermore, it is often suggested that Betjeman is a 'shallow' poet who uses a poetry-by-numbers methodology by which he is considered to fall back on the techniques of traditional verse to produce aesthetically unoriginal and conceptually unadventurous poetry. Stephen Cooper writes that 'Larkin's admiration for Betjeman has confounded his critics, who claim that the former poet laureate's nostalgic ramblings bear little relation to Larkin's more subtle reaction to post-war society' . But while superficially distinct from some of the most famous Modernist poetry, Betjeman's work is not in opposition to that movement. This essay will demonstrate in its technical examination of individual poems, much of the essential conceptual framework of Modernist thinking is in evidence in Betjeman - for example, literature's awareness of itself as existing in a literary tradition, vulgarity in portrayal of aspects of the human condition, and an experimental element to his technique, particularly in his use of verse form. The typical critical perspective on Betjeman is difficult to concretely locate in published criticism, such is the lack of critical interest in him for these reasons, but it is frequently pointed out by his supporters, including Andrew Motion, who cites the 'lack of academic interest in his work' , though none of Betjeman's supporters has himself produced extended, detailed critical analysis, commentary, or even a 'properly edited' collection of his work, as Motion further points out.

This essay contends that the scope of Betjeman's poetry is broad, and this will be demonstrated in microcosm: two technical aspects (which are arguably the most complex) of Betjeman's poetry will be analysed - the articulation and evocation of aspects of memory and the experimental and original control of verse form - to demonstrate the breadth of his poetic resources and to demonstrate that, while the gap into which Betjeman comfortably nestled in the twentieth century literature market existed, there are more significant aspects to his poetry. These include intricate, subtle and rigorous technical aspects that constitute an original genius for emotive communication.

In a bold yet almost imperceptible way Betjeman tests the effects of different verse forms and metrical effects in his work. In the poem 'Good-bye' , despite using a strict metrical form and a very regular, repetitious rhyme scheme, he writes something that sounds like prose. In 'The Commander' , Betjeman puts a lot of words in between rhyming line-endings.

On a shining day of October we remembered you, Commander, When trees were gold and still And some of their boughs were green where the whip of the wind had missed them On this nippy Staffordshire hill

In 'Goodbye' he does it to a lesser extent, with ten stressed syllables, and generally more unstressed ones, in between each pair of rhyming line-endings, occurring every other line, but with line-endings rhyming alternately, in an ABCDEBFD formation, so five stressed syllables between resolutions whereas in 'The Commander' nine or ten stressed syllables sustain an ABCB rhyme scheme: Some days before death When food is tasting sour on my tongue, Cigarettes long abandoned, Disgusting now even champagne; When I'm sweating a lot From the strain on a last bit of lung And lust has gone out Leaving only the things of the brain

However, in 'The Commander' the reader or listener can feel the rhyme coming, can feel the construction of a poetic form through the line, the building up to a suspension at the line-ending, and the expectation of its resolution after a regular interval, by the momentum created in the sprung rhythm of the lines, and the careful, aurally noticeable division of sections into lines, with the shorter 'B' part of the line severed from the 'A', or 'C', by a caesura. For example, in the first line of 'The Commander', Betjeman lends a consistent rhythmic pattern, with a natural caesura between 'October' and 'we', where syntax coalesces with rhythm, creating a sense of the verse's momentum building.

The two caesura-severed parts of this first line are rhythmically similar, with the same number of stressed syllables, three, in each, and a number of short, unstressed ones in between, and the overall regularity of this structuring asserts a lyrical function within the poem. The regularity of the pattern of the shorter 'B' line, or, more truly, the third segment of a longer true line, cordoned off by a secondary caesura, occurring as a sort of internal resolution of the line(s) it(them)self(ves) creates a network of suspension and resolution which is distinctly un-prosaic. Essentially, in this poem language is broken up into a clearly and carefully artificial, regular structure, where the effects of rhythm, before rhyme occurs, explicitly begin to control our response to the poem. For example, with this first line, the breaking up of the sentence through rhythm into each constituent phrase lends a special weight to each one, and a momentum that lends it a lyrical accessibility and an aural attraction. 'Good-bye', on the other hand, does not have these properties, at least not to the same degree. On the one hand the language is broken up by rhythm into phrases and the rhythm coincides with syntax, but the rhythm is also more subdued. Whereas in 'The Commander' there exists the rhythmic momentum of the verse with the first line's caesura-severed rhythmically similar phrase-pairing, 'On a shining day in October' and 'we remembered you, Commander', in 'Good-bye', there is, in the first line, no promise of anything lyrical like in 'The Commander', no springing rhythms (though the rhythm is sprung), but the rhythmically flatter 'Some days before death'.

In 'On a shining day in October' the momentum-creating build-up with the two unstressed syllables that start the line off, 'On a', then the iamb that follows 'shin-' - '-ing day' - picks up and sustains the rhythm, then again the rhythm is reinvigorated with two more unstressed, 'in Oct-', lending momentum to '-ob-' before '-er' lifts the line into the suspension of the anticipation of the following section of rhythm. The line builds up through an essentially rising, tricolonic structure. Whereas 'October', in 'The Commander', which has the same structural role as 'death' in 'Good-bye', has the little unstressed syllable that links it to the following phrase and sustains the verse (and indeed chimes aurally with 'Commander', further contributing to the fabric of suspension and resolution that renders the lyric quality of the poem), the first line of 'Good-bye' dies with 'death'. The following line therefore feels like a new thought, sprung prosaically. It is connected in sense and syntax, but not lyrically. Almost all the lines, as they are rendered in print, end with stressed syllables: 'death', 'tongue', 'champagne', 'lot', 'lung', 'out', 'brain', 'sung', 'prigs', 'pain', 'rung', 'roofs', 'plain', 'hill', 'chill'. This articulates the end of the line heavily, stresses the sense of the end of a discreet phrase, a thought, which breaks up any verse flow. Betjeman incorporates almost as much rhythmic variation as is possible between lines, within the structural possibilities of trisyllabic lines, at no point more so than in that between the first and second lines. 'Some days before death' contains only two 'springing', un-weighted syllable, 'Some', 'be-', or '-fore', depending how you choose to read it, whereas 'When food's tasting sour on my tongue' contains six of them: 'When', 'tast-','-ing', the second syllable of 'sour', 'on' and 'my'. This effect, particularly in this instance, at the beginning of the poem, guides the listener or reader's relationship to the piece, disrupting any framework of lyrical continuity, as is so exploited in 'The Commander', and further breaking down the lyric mirroring of phrases, of lines, of caesura-severed, discreet segments, with each other to create momentum, and the lyrical quality.

Hence, the poem sounds prosaic, but Betjeman is using the potential of verse to its fullest, for though the reader is not magnetised by the musical lilting of the verse as with 'The Commander', and the form is not so expansive, this more subdued, almost stealthy, verse form evokes the drudgery of thought, the weakness of the speaker, the blandness of life when near death, the futility of 'the Lord Civil Servant', with the plodding, purposely un-lyrical, yet poetic form, with the regular three-syllable lines not indulged as in 'The Commander'. It takes six of Betjeman's lines for a single rhyme to be completed, making it almost slip by unnoticed. When eventually the rhyming structure is perceived by the reader, the effect it actually serves is to highlight the broken-up, prosaic nature of the verse, as a sort of counterpoint, a demonstration that the piece is purposely being pulled away from lyric poetry's forms. And while the lines' lengths and their broken-up nature creates a deadened, insistent, repetitious quality, the rhymes, as they spring up, almost by surprise, create the effect of slowness, and a type of weak poetry, poetry diluted by prose, which mirrors the weakness of the speaker.