All Poems
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Felixstowe, or The Last of Her Order
© John Betjeman
With one consuming roar along the shingle
The long wave claws and rakes the pebbles down
To where its backwash and the next wave mingle,
A mounting arch of water weedy-brown
Against the tide the off-shore breezes blow.
Oh wind and water, this is Felixstowe.
Verses Turned...
© John Betjeman
Across the wet November night
The church is bright with candlelight
And waiting Evensong.
A single bell with plaintive strokes
Pleads louder than the stirring oaks
The leafless lanes along.
Westgate-On-Sea
© John Betjeman
Hark, I hear the bells of Westgate,
I will tell you what they sigh,
Where those minarets and steeples
Prick the open Thanet sky.
Back From Australia
© John Betjeman
At home in Cornwall hurrying autumn skies
Leave Bray Hill barren, Stepper jutting bare,
And hold the moon above the sea-wet sand.
The very last of late September dies
In frosty silence and the hills declare
How vast the sky is, looked at from the land.
The Cottage Hospital
© John Betjeman
At the end of a long-walled garden in a red provincial town,
A brick path led to a mulberry- scanty grass at its feet.
I lay under blackening branches where the mulberry leaves hung down
Sheltering ruby fruit globes from a Sunday-tea-time heat.
Apple and plum espaliers basked upon bricks of brown;
The air was swimming with insects, and children played in the street.
Trebetherick
© John Betjeman
We used to picnic where the thrift
Grew deep and tufted to the edge;
We saw the yellow foam flakes drift
In trembling sponges on the ledge
A Bay In Anglesey
© John Betjeman
The sleepy sound of a tea-time tide
Slaps at the rocks the sun has dried,Too lazy, almost, to sink and lift
Round low peninsulas pink with thrift.The water, enlarging shells and sand,
Grows greener emerald out from landAnd brown over shadowy shelves below
Winter Seascape
© John Betjeman
The sea runs back against itself
With scarcely time for breaking wave
To cannonade a slatey shelf
And thunder under in a cave.
Winter Landscape
© John Betjeman
The three men coming down the winter hill
In brown, with tall poles and a pack of hounds
At heel, through the arrangement of the trees,
Past the five figures at the burning straw,
An Edwardian Sunday, Broomhill, Sheffield
© John Betjeman
High dormers are rising
So sharp and surprising,
And ponticum edges
The driveways of gravel;
Dilton Marsh Halt
© John Betjeman
Was it worth keeping the Halt open,
We thought as we looked at the sky
Red through the spread of the cedar-tree,
With the evening train gone by?
Upper Lambourne
© John Betjeman
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 -
South London Sketch
© John Betjeman
From Bermondsey to Wandsworth
So many churches are,
Some with apsidal chancels,
Some Perpendicular
On a Portrait of a Deaf Man
© John Betjeman
The kind old face, the egg-shaped head,
The tie, discreetly loud,
The loosely fitting shooting clothes,
A closely fitting shroud.
Cornish Cliffs
© John Betjeman
Those moments, tasted once and never done,
Of long surf breaking in the mid-day sun.
A far-off blow-hole booming like a gun-
Ireland With Emily
© 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.
Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican
© John Betjeman
Isn't she lovely, "the Mistress"?
With her wide-apart grey-green eyes,
The droop of her lips and, when she smiles,
Her glance of amused surprise?
The Plantster's Vision
© John Betjeman
Cut down that timber! Bells, too many and strong,
Pouring their music through the branches bare,
From moon-white church towers down the windy air
Have pealed the centuries out with Evensong.
The Licorice Fields at Pontefract
© John Betjeman
In the licorice fields at Pontefract
My love and I did meet
And many a burdened licorice bush
Was blooming round our feet;
Dawlish
© John Betjeman
Bird-watching colonels on the old sea wall,
Down here at Dawlish where the slow trains crawl:
Low tide lifting, on a shingle shore,
Long-sunk islands from the sea once more:
