Memory And Poetic Form In John Betjeman`s Poetry - Part 2

Baudelaire creates the inverse effect in his 'prose poems', by elevating, with occasional flurries of poeticism, mostly un-metrical language - language which does not invite in the reader the same level of precise attendance to language (according to Ricks, poetry has a tendency to be 'laden, not casual' ). In 'Enivrez-Vous' , Baudelaire starts with syntactically varied, metrically irregular sentences:

Il faut etre toujours ivre. Tout est la: c'est l'unique question. Pour ne pas sentir l'horrible fardeau du Temps qui brise vos epaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous enivrer sans treve

Later, he deploys sequence of phrases possessing metrical regularity and the coincidence of syntactic and semantic delineation - 'poetic' form embedded in prose:

...demandez au vent, a la vague, a l'etoile, a l'oiseau, a l'horloge, a tout ce qui fuit, a tout ce qui gemit, a tout ce qui roule, a tout ce qui chante, a toute ce qui parle...

Baudelaire represent feelings and intellectual processes that he determines are most effectively communicated by continuous, prosaic, un-delineated presentation of thought focusing on precise, semantically and syntactically explicit representation (not embellishing the architecture of linguistic construct by using a poetic form) and within this framework creates supplementary, more 'poetic' effects. Betjeman's ambition and achievement in his opposite, equally experimental effect, is akin to Baudelaire's, but Betjeman's subtlety in deploying prosaic linguistic traits in verse form tends to be lost in casual analysis as it is embedded in the broken-up form of verse, whereas Baudelaire's subtlety in use of poetic technique amidst prose announces itself, as a linguistic heightening, in contrast to Betjeman's lowering of register in 'Good-bye'.

Adam Piette says that 'as an emotional event, by which I mean an event where the possibilities of memory, imagination and conceptual rhymes enter into play, the fabrication of stress-lines and key-words becomes a miniature act of readerly and narratorial memory' . This also coordinates with Hallam's contention of rhyme as 'contain[ing] in itself a constant appeal to Memory' . Betjeman shows one aspect of the depth of his technical faculties with his use of form in the evocation of memory, and shows himself to be alive to the subtle possibilities of verse outlined by Piette and Hallam. 'The Cockney Amorist' contains a complex conceit of memory - the projection by a speaker in the present of future retrospect in light of a yet-to-occur emotional event, the break-up of his relationship with his 'darling'. Betjeman uses a distinct structure in the second, third and fourth stanzas, each with six lines deploying an ABCBDB rhyme scheme. This structure is distinct from that of the framing stanzas, the first and fifth, which are each of four lines, and an ABAB rhyme scheme. This highlights the act of structural repetition within the middle three stanzas, as it does within the first and last, evoking the distance between the present (albeit by the end a slightly shifted 'present') represented in the first and last stanza ('when [...] you've left me here' - my emphasis) and the eventual act of retrospect performed in the middle three. The additional emphasis that the act of the verse's structural repetition acquires also reflects, and contributes to the evocation of, the repetitious act of returning to the past. Piette points out that the effect of rhyme is reflective of the act of memory because the second of a pair of rhyming words recalls the first. Betjeman cultivates the supplementary effect of structural 'rhyme', with the original device of the framing device as a means of counterpoint.

Beyond the more fundamental aspects of the architecture of verse form, Betjeman displays sophistication in the narrative layering of his verse in the evocation of memory. The central narrative of the poem 'Narcissus' , that of a Victorian child separated from his 'bosom boyfriend', is framed by the device of the adult version of the child remembering what is recounted. The first line represents the speaker not only remembering the central events that are to be unfolded, but remembering a previous moment of remembering them - 'Yes, it was Bedford Park the vision came from'. This line puts special weight on the significance of the aforementioned events by implying that the memory of them - a 'vision' that has already occurred is being summoned again, necessarily, by the act of remembering the memory of it. The 'vision' is shown to be something worth returning to, both by the very act of starting the poem with a declaration of a purposeful revisiting of the memory, and by making a point of a deliberate interrogation of the memory to yield a fuller remembrance: obviously the speaker has remembered the 'vision', then deliberately sought more detail in the memory, secondarily remembering that it came from Bedford Park. The use of 'Yes' articulates this mental process, indicating the desired moment of fuller memory. 'Yes' also connotes exclamation, and this dimension of it is picked up again by the word 'vision', with its religious and spiritual connotations, altogether conferring on the line an especially heightened significance, implying revelation. The further significance of this line is that it focuses on the process of memory. At the very moment of narrating the process of memory (remembering the remembrance), 'Yes, it was Bedford Park', the speaker simultaneously commences the narration of the main sequence of events, with the setting of scene. And so the development of the central narrative is integrated with the act of remembering - it continues to represent the process of memory it is born of as much as it represents the sequence of events it relates. The significance attached to memory itself is emphasised by that quality of revelation already mentioned. The first line automatically provokes the reader to questions - as to the nature of the vision, as to its apparently considerable significance - and draws him into the poem with the detail of 'in Bedford Park', which represents a glimmer of a fuller story (Betjeman, as ever, using the principle of eliciting curiosity to draw the reader into the poem's processes) and the first line is laced with intrigue that is centred on the issue of the act of memory, and so provokes and commences an examination of memory, underpinned with a Wordsworthian evocation of memory as metaphysically transcendent.

When the end of the poem is reached the complexity of the framing device crystallises. There is a framing device within a framing device - the memory of the memory of childhood - and the last line, 'I clung for safety to my teddy bear', could equally refer to the speaker as a child in the main narrative as it could to the speaker being remembered as an adult having the initial memory which the speaker, as he speaks in the 'present', is remembering having. So there are two competing images, which consequently become entwined with each other - an image of a child hugging his teddy bear out of fear and anxiety, and an image of an adult hugging a teddy bear 'for safety', revisited by the trauma of those childhood events. While the framing device on the one hand distances the speaker from his childhood self, locating the former in the present and the latter in the past, it also ends up blurring them together. Equally the line 'Mother where are you? Bobby, Bobby, where?' could refer to either of the speaker's two remembered incarnations. No speech marks surround any of the lines of speech spoken from the perspective of the child ('Oh tell me, Mother, what I mustn't do...', 'For I know hide-and-seek's most secret places...'), possibly suggesting that the speaker is directly imaginatively reliving the experience as he speaks them, or possibly representing an intensified, dramatic form of quotation. The contrast, though, with the speeches of the mother, being in speech marks, suggests the former, though that frustrates the automatic inference provoked between the lines 'As off the garden gate I picked the blisters' and 'Oh tell me, Mother, what I mustn't do' - the narrative movement from 'your sisters / Playing at hide-and-seek', through 'I picked the blisters, to 'Oh tell me', seems to progressively get nearer to the internal aspect of the child, starting with a third person, then objectively narrating himself. The consequent automatic logical inference is that 'Oh tell me' represents an expression by the child. But this situation crystallises the ambiguity of the lines with regard to whether they are conscious quotation by the speaker of his childhood self or representative of the speaker's self-relocation in his childhood - 'Bobby, Bobby, where?' could, therefore, be being spoken by the 'present' speaker, or by both the remembered, 'envisioning', adult version of himself, or by the child version.

This evokes the process of vivid regression to childhood experience, with the present and past converging totally at the poem's conclusion. The economy with which Betjeman integrates the present and two stages of the past in the first line, along with those other effects mentioned above contributes further to the evocation of complex interactions between temporal stages. Betjeman dramatises by graduations the coming together of the speaker's past selves and his present self, with the line 'Bobby dear, / I didn't want my tea' being an intermediate stage, where one or the other adult version of the speaker has taken on the emotional situation of his childhood self, with the address 'Bobby dear' reflecting presently existent passion felt for Bobby. But Betjeman maintains the distance between past and present with the still-retrospective 'I didn't want'. The speaker flits from the perspective of the child ('we can warm and hug each other silly') to the perspective of the adult, recounting ('My Mother wouldn't tell me why...'), sustaining the tension between past(s) and present, building up to its collapse at the poem's end.

This conceit evokes the depth of the effect of childhood experience on the adult self, and deconstructs the adult self back to the childhood self, stripping away the distance between adulthood and childhood that is initially projected. There is pathos in the deconstruction of the adult self, and the process does prove revelatory, the memory 'visionary', with the rediscovery of childhood emotions deep-seated in the adult self. That first line resonates through the whole poem - Betjeman dramatises and evokes the nature of the hidden, forgotten memories and emotions that can shape, tragically and irrevocably, the adult self. He provocatively emphasises that his speaker has only discovered his repressed emotional state by very deliberately revisiting his 'vision', evoking the complexity and mystery of the mind. By invoking the spiritual connotations of 'vision', ultimately showing the process of the speaker's remembrance to be truly revelatory, exposing old, still-raw emotional damage, and with the quasi-metaphysical transposition of the adult into the child, Betjeman infers a palpably transcendent quality in the nature of the human mind, at once mystical and delicate, but also frightening.

In conjunction with the pathos which is evoked in relation to the child's situation, this conceit evokes the ongoing horror of childhood emotional trauma. Betjeman represents the child as a victim of profound, inadvertent cruelty, of which the very severity is further emphasised by its continuing effect on the adult. Within the complexity and subtlety of the framing device, leaking with some degree of ambiguity into the main narrative, Betjeman, like Robert Browning in poems like 'A Toccata of Galuppi's' , uses for the poem's fabric an intricate network of temporal and intellectual perspectives which interact dynamically to yield an array of complexities. The personal history of the speaker is counterpointed by the sociological history that is touched upon with such understated significance and pregnancy. Betjeman is careful to mitigate the mother's unwitting cruelty by contextualising her attitudes historically, establishing very obviously the Victorian setting, with 'de Morgan lustre', an Arnold Dolmetsch spinet, and the backdrop of the early days of the suffrage movement all established in the first stanza. This ensures that the reader is mindful of the sexually repressed socio-religious attitudes prevalent in the Victorian mindset in understanding the mother's treatment of her son.

The use of the Victorian setting by Betjeman is similar, in terms of the levels of narrative subtlety it facilitates, to the use of it by Browning in above-mentioned 'A Tocatta of Galuppi's'. Browning draws on the Victorian era as an intellectually turbulent period of spiritual and artistic uncertainty and of sociological change. He makes it interact with Renaissance Venice, through the mind of a depressed scientist, and via an imagined interaction with the composer Galuppi, to frame an assessment, and a complex, holistic evocation, of something of human nature and the mortal predicament in the context of social history. Past, present, art, science and imagination are framed together and interact fluidly to create a multi-faceted, layered construct yielding a diverse tissue of effects and arguments, and offering a rich multitude of alternative effects depending on the reader's perspective and approach to his reading of the poem. The process of imagination in Browning's speaker performs a role analogous to that of memory in Betjeman's in the ingenious narrative conceits deployed in their respective poems. Browning's use of the dramatic monologue almost certainly affected the composition of 'Narcissus'. As Michael Meredith writes of Browning's legacy, 'a post-Freudian age valued the psychological insights and opportunities the dramatic monologue provided' . As demonstrated, this lends itself to Betjeman's intentions in this poem, and he uses several of Browning's most subtle techniques in his use of the dramatic monologue medium.