Grand send-off
'Was so much nobility ever afloat?' The Poet Laureate's description of the water picnic in Sir John Piers would have done nicely for his own memorial ser- vice in Westminster Abbey. It was a grand send-off, and Betjeman would have found it hard to resist: 'I say, the Archbish and nineteen padres robed and in the sanctuary — not bad going.' The highlight was John Oaksey reading Trebetherick with as much gusto as if he was whooping home a friend's horse at Newbury. The clerics spoke elo- quently of Betjeman's Doubts and fear of death, even of his 'reverent agnosticism' (which sounds as if he merely remembered
to take his hat off in church). Doubts are good for business, like dry rot for builders. Yet even here in this celebration of perhaps the greatest Englishman of his time, the point seemed to be missed as it has been so often missed before. For the umpteenth time, Betjeman was described as a poet of 'romance and nostalgia' — i.e. a funny chap who wrote verse about funny old buildings and funny old trains. But what one cannot miss about his best poems (and not only his best ones) is how utterly un- antiquarian they are. What brings them alive is how exactly Betjeman describes things as they look now and how directly he describes his own feelings of terror, guilt and decay. By contrast, famous modernists such as Pound and Eliot so often seem nostalgic and antiquarian when they hark back to past 'cultures' in which people did supposedly feel things genuinely. No other English poet since Hardy has conveyed both the melancholy of life and the beauty of England so unforgettably. 'He was a man who used to notice such things.' Nobody else has taught us so well to look around us or to treasure and hold on to what's left. Nobody else has made such good jokes.
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