Betjeman

I have been trying to buy Lord Mount Prospect by John Betjeman and these days you can get anything … at a price.

Not available on Amazon but Abebooks have sourced a copy in America offered at $150. Seems a bit steep for a short story, albeit in a limited edition, though I am tempted:

Item Description: Privately Printed at the Tragara Press, Edinburgh, 1981. White card covers with marbled paper DW and cover label, small 8vo., 29, (1) pages, frontispiece. One of 95 numbered copies printed in Bell type on Barcham Green handmade paper. The story first appeared in “The London Mercury” in 1929, two years before Betjeman’s first book publication. A fine copy in archival mylar.

Anyway, rummaging around on the internet I stumbled on this Betjeman love poem to Ireland (at least I think that’s what it is) where he worked in the British Embassy in WW II (aka The Emergency) as Press attaché.

Ireland With Emily by John Betjeman

Bells are booming down the bohreens,
White the mist along the grass,
Now the Julias, Maeves and Maureens
Move between the fields to Mass.
Twisted trees of small green apple
Guard the decent whitewashed chapel,
Gilded gates and doorway grained,
Pointed windows richly stained
With many-coloured Munich glass.

See the black-shawled congregations
On the broidered vestment gaze
Murmer past the painted stations
As Thy Sacred Heart displays
Lush Kildare of scented meadows,
Roscommon, thin in ash-tree shadows,
And Westmeath the lake-reflected,
Spreading Leix the hill-protected,
Kneeling all in silver haze?

In yews and woodbine, walls and guelder,
Nettle-deep the faithful rest,
Winding leagues of flowering elder,
Sycamore with ivy dressed,
Ruins in demesnes deserted,
Bog-surrounded bramble-skirted –
Townlands rich or townlands mean as
These, oh, counties of them screen us
In the Kingdom of the West.

Stony seaboard, far and foreign,
Stony hills poured over space,
Stony outcrop of the Burren,
Stones in every fertile place,
Little fields with boulders dotted,
Grey-stone shoulders saffron-spotted,
Stone-walled cabins thatched with reeds,
Where a Stone Age people breeds
The last of Europe’s stone age race.

Has it held, the warm June weather?
Draining shallow sea-pools dry,
When we bicycled together
Down the bohreens fuchsia-high.
Till there rose, abrupt and lonely,
A ruined abbey, chancel only,
Lichen-crusted, time-befriended,
Soared the arches, splayed and splendid,
Romanesque against the sky.

There in pinnacled protection,
One extinguished family waits
A Church of Ireland resurrection
By the broken, rusty gates.
Sheepswool, straw and droppings cover,
Graves of spinster, rake and lover,
Whose fantastic mausoleum,
Sings its own seablown Te Deum,
In and out the slipping slates.