READING A POEM A DAY 6  6.12.2016

Ireland with Emily

John Betjeman

It starts with a bustle of b's, an alarum, alliterating with Betjeman himself

Bells are booming down the bohreens

And we're off, crossing Ireland, in the warm June weather

When we bicycled together

Down the bohreens fushcia-high.

There is an old-world Anglican gentility about Betjeman's cycle tour of Ireland with Emily. Are they daisy-daisying on a bicycle made for two? They are in tandem, at least, on a straight line east to west taking in Kildare, Leix and Westmeath, reaching

Roscommon, thin in ash tree-shadows.

There are six stanzas of precise, clever descriptions, rhyming ababccdde, in a rolling rhythm the reader feels as wheel turns, while the tar bubbles on the small roads, sun-soaked and smelling like

Lush Kildare of scented meadows.

Of course, it being Betjeman, there are churches, Catholic to start, Protestant to finish, written as tidy, charming word pictures, almost like greeting card testimonies.

Twisted trees of small green apple

Guard the decent white-washed chapel,

and, what seems like Betjeman and Emily's destination, reached in the final stanza,

There in pinnacled protection

One extinguished family waits

A Church of Ireland resurrection.

There is genuine allure in the work of Betjeman. It is old-fashioned, yet pert as budding new growth and when, not very often, it leans into darkness, it takes on earthen tones, echoing Hughes, best seen here when Betjeman and Emily make it to the Burren and further west.

Stone walled cabins thatched with reeds

Where a Stone Age people breeds

The last of Europe's stone age race.

http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/john_betjeman/poems/831

Collected Poems: John Betjeman; John Murray, London, 1958

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