Collected Poems by John Betjeman

Author:John Betjeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466878280
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Uffington

Tonight we feel the muffled peal

Hang on the village like a pall;

It overwhelms the towering elms—

That death-reminding dying fall;

The very sky no longer high

Comes down within the reach of all.

Imprisoned in a cage of sound

Even the trivial seems profound.

Anglo-Catholic Congresses

We, who remember the Faith, the grey-headed ones,

Of those Anglo-Catholic Congresses swinging along,

Who heard the South Coast salvo of incense-guns

And surged to the Albert Hall in our thousands strong

With ‘extreme’ colonial bishops leading in song;

We, who remember, look back to the blossoming May-time

On ghosts of servers and thurifers after Mass,

The slapping of backs, the flapping of cassocks, the play-time,

A game of Grandmother’s Steps on the vicarage grass—

“Father, a little more sherry. I’ll fill your glass.”

We recall the triumph, that Sunday after Ascension,

When our Protestant suffragan suffered himself to be coped—

The SYA and the Scheme for Church Extension—

The new diocesan’s not as ‘sound’ as we’d hoped,

And Kensit threatens and has Sam Gurney poped?

Yet, under the Travers baroque, in a limewashed whiteness,

The fiddle-back vestments a-glitter with morning rays,

Our Lady’s image, in multiple-candled brightness,

The bells and banners—those were the waking days

When Faith was taught and fanned to a golden blaze.

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