Memory And Poetic Form In John Betjeman`s Poetry - Part 3

Betjeman firmly lays the blame for the damage done to the speaker at the feet of the Victorian era itself, reminding us that this was the culture that condemned Oscar Wilde ('she said I was her precious child, / And once there was a man named Oscar Wilde'). He points out that it was a harshly repressive, and consequently cruel society, but he doesn't use the figure of the mother as a symbol of this harsh society - she is plainly a loving mother ('Mother will read her boy a page or two / Before she goes'), indeed she is herself associated with moral progression, as 'Chiswick's earliest suffragette', a point whose significance is heavily emphasised, a whole rhyming couplet dedicated to it, at the end of the seventh stanza ('Before she goes, this Women's Suffrage Week, / To hear that clever Mrs Pankhurst speak') just before she speaks the lines which are the most uncomfortable of all to read in the poem: 'Sleep with your hands above your head. That's right - / And let no evil thoughts pollute the dark', demonstrating the transmission of her psychologically dangerous, repressed view of sexuality, and anxiety about it, to her son, the inference of potential 'evil' in his thoughts a harsh conceptual corruption of the innocence of youth. Betjeman emphasises that he is mitigating her cruelty, and to some degree isolating it from her nature. She consequently is portrayed as a conduit for the cruelty of the age. And so in this regard the poem is a critique of Victorian society, which is shown to corrupt parental compassion. But Betjeman in fact evokes the era with great ambiguity. The initial impression of it, conveyed by the first stanza, is positive, the poem even starting with the most purely positive word in English 'Yes', and being set in a pleasant part of London, Bedford Park. The speaker refers to a 'vision' of 'lustre glowing round the hearth', a 'sweet flower [...] / Nodding among the lilies in the garth' - all pastoral, wholesome images with positive connotations. Then 'Mother' is introduced, evoking the security of a child's maternal relationship.

Betjeman's evocation of the process of memory is an evocation of emotional fragility - memory is a route to self-deconstruction and emotional exposure. This is dramatised by the cumulative generation of pathos as the poem proceeds from a starting point of seeming positivity, and by the deconstruction of the evocation of the Victorian era as implicitly solid and secure, a nostalgic evocation, to an era of emotional hardship and breakdown. The deconstruction begins with the word 'delicate' in 'I was a delicate boy', the first hint of happiness as something precarious. And the delicacy seems to refer as well to the delicacy of our relationship with the past, our precarious contentment as individuals with our childhood and our society's tenuous, problematic nostalgia for times past, seen at first, as by the speaker at first, by default, through rose-tinted glasses, but then on further examination not the good old days at first assumed.

Betjeman's Browning-esque establishment of historical context as a central feature of the poem results in further interactions with the poem's other facets. The evocation of Victorian society's own obsession with the past is brought out in the mother's words:

Open your story book and find a tale Of ladyes fayre and deeds of dering-do, Or good Sir Gawaine and the Holy Grail

This section remind us of the Victorian preoccupation with the medieval, suggesting that the Victorians' nostalgic sociological relationship with the past is analogous to ours, and making the point that social history repeats itself. And yet this is not on the surface an examination of sociological implications - it is more immediately, given the high emotional stakes of the narrative at this point, evoking the disconnect between mother and son. The mother is creating a veneer of seeming contentment over a tense, implicitly unhappy situation, of the repression of the speaker's childhood homosexuality. And the conceit also captures a further subtlety - the love of the mother for the son. Thomas McFarland writes that 'Neither individuality nor community can be felt without the other, although each strains against its complement. The paradox reflects no adventitious alignment of possibilities, but rather an irreducible truth of what it is to be human' . Betjeman inextricably entwines the experience of the individual with the situation of society. In doing this he articulates analogues between them, in terms of their respective ambiguities, and it is upon his treatment of memory that the most evocative aspects of this representation hinge, articulating as it does, by the unfolding of its own nature and mechanisms, their parallel elements. Indeed, Tim Cook refers to 'A Toccata of Galuppi's by way of demonstrating Browning's mastery of mood change in verse , and Betjeman's deployment of similar techniques in 'Narcissus' create a similar, gradually dramatised mood change.

There is a further highly significant element to the poem's overall structure which further frustrates the view of Betjeman as unsubtly regressive or derivative. The poem is rich with Wordsworthian undertones, established by the image of the daffodil, or Narcissus, its botanical name, 'nodding with the lilies in the garth', rather like Wordsworth's daffodils that '[toss] their heads in spritely dance' . And the connection of the boyhood quasi-romantic love affair with nature draws from the Romantic, and particularly Wordsworthian tradition, of perceiving nature as the source of transcendent feeling.

Nothing above us but twigs and sky, Nothing below but the leaf-mould chilly Where we can warm and hug each other silly

Betjeman subverts Wordsworthian notions to create the tragic sense of a pure, Wordsworthian love being traumatised. He takes the image of the daffodil and it connotations, by association with Wordsworth, of Romantic ideals, pure love and the perfection of nature, and projects onto it the destructive connotations of narcissistic 'self-love'. The natural imagery in passages reflective of his playtime with Bobby, the 'twigs and sky', is quickly brought down, as their relationship is forced apart. We are left with the speaker picking 'blisters' off the garden gate, a bathetic climb down and contrast with Wordsworthian high-flown aggrandising imagery. And the Wordsworthian principle of the 'Child' being 'Father to the Man' is used to tragic effect, implying that the traumas of childhood continue to emotionally devastate throughout life. The daffodil in Wordsworth's poetry is also the symbol of the spiritual power of memory, but in a positive, life-affirming way ('And then my heart with pleasure fills / And dances with the daffodils'), whereas here the power of memory is essentially damaging. So Betjeman actually renders a cynical modification of an archetypal Romantic notion of memory. Marcel Raymond writes: 'Narcissus scorning the nymphs, infatuated with himself - the psychologists could not have chosen a better symbol for the tendency to introversion' . Raymond is writing about Henri de Regnier and Gide's evocation of the mythical figure, the boy who 'Saw his face in a forest well / And never looked away again' , but Betjeman certainly invites, along these lines, a psychoanalytical view of a quasi-pathological mindset, a profound frustration of the Wordsworthian daffodils' connotations.

Paul Valery writes:

The idea of Poetry is often contrasted with that of Thought, and particularly "Abstract Thought." People say "Poetry and Abstract Thought" as they say Good and Evil, Vice and Virtue, Hot and Cold. Most people, without thinking any further, believe that the analytical work of the intellect, the efforts of will and precision in which it implicates the mind, are incompatible with that freshness of inspiration, that flow of expression, that grace and fancy which are the signs of poetry and which reveal it at its very first words.

Betjeman engages in 'Narcissus' with the 'flow of expression', and imbues it with the 'freshness of inspiration', of the human mind, which he reckons signify poetry, by articulating the processes of thought, of memory in particular, and so defies the common prejudice Valery outlines of 'Thought' as something unpoetical, and in doing so, according to this principle, renders the process of memory evoked as existing in a special, transcendent bracket of thought, which is heightened and mystical - metaphysical. T. S. Eliot writes:

'People [...] are suspicious of any poetry that has a particular purpose: poetry in which the poet is advocating social, moral, political or religious views. And they are much more inclined to say that it isn't poetry when they dislike the particular views; just as other people often think that something is real poetry because it happens to express a point of view which they like. I should say that the question of whether the poet is using his poetry because it happens to advocate or attack a social attitude does not matter. Bad verse may have a transient vogue when the poet is reflecting a popular attitude of the moment; but real poetry survives not only a change of popular opinion but the complete extinction of interest in the issues with which the poet was passionately concerned.'

Betjeman manages to create a specifically sociological poem, putting forward specific, though complex, assertions about a specific moment in history, and very pointedly roots the poem in its historical setting. He does 'attack a social attitude', which is no longer prevalent in society, but by centring his perspective on it on the innate human process of memory and dramatises the historical context through a highly individual, internal intellectual process, and through an individualistic microcosm of the society it looks back on (the family narrative), he makes a social comment timeless, and allows the comment to retain its specific reference to the era it refers to, but also act as a construct for the examination of wider, more universal ideas.

The difficulty in defining Betjeman in the context of literary movements, and the way in which different aspects of his verse associate him with various, supposedly divergent traditions demonstrate the interrelatedness of literary movements. The level of his technical sophistication and ingenuity alone places him alongside the likes of Eliot and Wordsworth, as well as the range of techniques he deploys. 'Narcissus', for example, contains a fusion of Romantic ideas and modernistic narrative complexity.

In 'Clash Went the Billiard Balls' , Betjeman playfully relates his work to T. S. Eliot's using elements of Modernist technique:

Goodnight, Alf! Goodnight, Bert! Goodnight, Mrs. Gilligan! Rain in the archway, no trams in the street.

Betjeman is clearly imitating 'Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May.' From the end of Eliot's 'A Game of Chess ' , and there are satirical elements in Betjeman's treatment. The act of imitation is itself satirical. It makes Eliot's poetry seem in one way banal, as, by reproducing some of the qualities of Eliot's language in a clearly insincere, derivative way, it renders it vacuous. Furthermore, the subtle surprise of the pentasyllabic 'Mrs. Gilligan' after the third 'Goodnight' - Betjeman having, up till then mirrored Eliot's rhythms - is a comic effect, which undercuts the 'seriousness' typically inferred in 'The Waste Land'. 'Rain in the archway, no trams on the street' furthers the tension between the intrinsic effects of the language - the evocation of sombre city stasis - and the very apparent light-hearted intentions of the poet to produce comedy. The line is as well a collision of a few of the most stereotypical elements of Eliot's verse - imagery of a desolate scene, the city, the rain; a verb-less line; even the word 'street', which is something of an Eliot calling-card - and so Betjeman intensifies the satirical action of the poem.

He sustains the comic tension arising from the deployment of key elements of such a distinctive style with lines such as: 'COP COP / Cop on the cobbleway', deploying Eliot-esque rhythm repetition, and, again, the street imagery. However, as the poem develops, Betjeman brings in more of his own style and originality into the poem. Whereas those third to sixth lines were blatant, simple imitation, he goes on to create his own, inherently interesting effects: 'Counting the coppers to see what they've got of 'em / Glistening wet at the bar', a rhythmically punchy, momentum-gathering pair of lines that combines vivid imagery and dramatic situation.

As in 'Narcissus' he relates himself as a poet to the Modernist traditions by displaying a control of techniques associated with that movement (in this example relating more directly to specifics of verse form rather than narrative layering). However, in the superficiality and light-hearted style of the poem, and the distinctness of the Betjeman personality within it, he also distances himself from the movement, as, in 'Narcissus' the deployment of distinctly 'un-modernistic' technique confuses how he can be defined. This example relates to Modernist poets but he similarly 'takes on' others, Hardy , Wordsworth and Victorian hymn-writers , for example, in many other poems. He ultimately asserts his own individuality as a poet above subscri ption to any particular movement. His poetry overtly represents a self-contained movement of its own, 'Betjemanism' perhaps, and perhaps part of his possible importance as a poet lies in this assertion of the greater significance of the 'individual talent' and its greater fundamentality to the nature of art, than of the alignment of individuals' art with movements and defined traditions.