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Pressed by Pam. Betjeman stands for the local, the small, the decent; and his verse is filled with an engaging shorthand of brand names -Austin cars, Craven A cigarettes, Heinz's Ketchup, Post Toasties. In one poem he used the names of real people to ironic effect ("T. S. Eliot, H. G. Wells and Edith Sitwell lie in Mell-stock Churchyard now"), but added the thoughtful note: "The names are put in not out of malice or satire but merely for their euphony."
Despite his coziness, he has a keen sense of the skull beneath the skin, has set down chilling visions of approaching death. Though his most typical tone is somewhere between mockery and sentimentality, he can be fiercely satirical. During the war, when he worked at the Ministry of Information, Betjeman wrote a sardonic prayer:
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.
In some of his funniest poems Betjeman is given to adolescent admiration of female tennis players ("Pam, I adore you, Pam, you great big mountainous sports girl"). He cries to be a sports girl's racket, pressed to her breast or flying in the sunlit air. But Betjeman is not chiefly a poet of humor. Born a Quaker, but now a deeply serious Anglican, he can write of religion with earnest simplicity or with a chuckle ("The old Great Western Railway makes me very sorry for my sins").
Grace Notes. Betjeman both likes and deplores the sad, cramped lives of city suburbs. His own life is cramped by book reviewing (London Daily Telegraph), a trade he detests, but he has managed some grace notes. His Berkshire country home is an old rectory in Wantage, birthplace of Alfred the Great. There his busy wife Penelope (daughter of Field Marshal Lord Chetwode) hunts and fishes with Pam-like energy, keeps an eye on their son and daughter and runs a thriving tea shop called King Alfred's Kitchen. She puts up jam; he musingly produces about one poem every six weeks. "Almost any age seems civilized except that in which I live," he once wrote. "But it's wrong to think my verse ironical. I write of things I care about." In The Old Liberals he hauntingly evoked not only the archaic graces of two old people playing chamber music together in the dusk, but the waning echoes of an age:
For deep in the hearts of the man and
the woman playing The rose of a world that was not has
withered away. Where are the wains with garlanded
swathes a-swaying? Where are the swains to wend through
the lanes a-maying? Where are the blithe and jocund to ted
the hay? Where are the free folk of England?
Where are they?