John Betjeman, Poet of the Suburbs?

"Betjeman has a mind of extraordinary originality." Sir Maurice Bowra.

"In other words he is not a nature poet, like Wordsworth, but a landscape poet like Crabbe and, like Crabbe, he is a painter of the particular, the recognisable landscape; his trees are not merely real trees with their roots in the earth, they are conifers with their roots in the red sand of Camberley, feathery ash in leathery Lambourne, or forsythia in the Banbury road." John Sparrow.

Upper Lambourne

Up the ash-tree climbs the ivy,

Up the ivy climbs the sun,

With a twenty-thousand pattering

Has a valley breeze begun,

Feathery ash, neglected elder, 

Shift the Shade and make it run----

Shift the shade toward the nettles,

And the nettles set it free

To streak the stained Carrara headstone

Where, in nineteen-twenty-three,

He who trained a hundred winners

paid the Final Entrance Fee.

Leathery limbs of upper Lambourne,

Leathery skin from sun and wind,

Leathery breeches, spreading stables,

Shining saddles left behind----

To the down the string of horses

Moving out of sight and mind.

Feathery ash in leathery Lambourne

Waves above the sarsen stone,

And Edwardian plantations

So coniferously moan

As to make the swelling downland,

Far-surrounding, seem their own.

I adore the whole notion of  John Betjeman. His earnestness and delight in the everyday. Championing the small churches and the railways, whilst journeying through a warm and comfortable bygone era.