Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
He took me on long silent walks
In country lanes when young.
He knew the names of ev’ry bird
But not the song it sung.
And when he could not hear me speak
He smiled and looked so wise
That now I do not like to think
Of maggots in his eyes.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why, but the rhyming lines about a man who ‘looked so wise’ and reminded the poet ‘of maggots in his eyes’ struck me as the wittiest and most entertaining in the entire collection of John Betjeman’s poetry, selected by Hugo Williams.
I am not going to be able to rate this hardback edition, because, quite frankly, some of John Betjeman’s poems flew over my head. They were too British, colloquial, confined to regional phrases, references, whose meaning I couldn’t grasp as an international reader.
The opening poem, Death in Leamington, stands out as one of the most easy to understand pieces in the collection – a somber, melancholic account of a nurse discovering a woman’s lifeless body in her bedroom. Funnily, I initially misinterpreted the ending: the final line mentions the nurse turning “down the gas in the hall,” which led me to briefly assume the woman had taken her own life by leaving the gas on. However, it simply refers to the gas used for heating the room. Although my initial misinterpretation made me appreciate the poem even more. It added a layer of tragedy to the mundane death of the woman, with the final line serving as an unexpected twist (through my perspective).
From expressing harsh disgust over the excessive industrialization of towns and reliance on tinned goods to paying odes to town ghosts, this collection of poetry is definitely an interesting pick for both fans and newcomers to John Betjeman’s work. His rhymes, meters, and choice of words and phrases in most poems are entertainingly excellent, playful, and, most of all, poetic.
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