A Little Book of Bourgeois Verse

 By way of the excellent AbeBooks, I have acquired a copy of Continual Dew: A Little Book of Bourgeois Verse, Betjeman's first commercially published collection (1937) – not the prohibitively expensive first edition, but a beautifully made facsimile from 1977, complete with gold fore-edge and India-paper insert. It's pleasingly illustrated too, with an arresting cover by E. McKnight Kauffer, and embellishments by Osbert Lancaster, Hubert de Cronin Hastings and others. I was surprised to discover how many of Betjeman's best-known poems are in this early volume, including the ever popular 'Slough' ('Come, friendly bombs...') and perhaps his finest poem, 'The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel'. What is also striking is how death-fixated the young poet was, and how dark some of his work already was. As well as the relatively well-known, beautifully controlled 'Death in Leamington', there is this one, new to me –

For Nineteenth-Century Burials

This cold weather
Carries so many old people away.
Quavering voices and blankets and breath
Go silent together. 
The gentle fingers are touching to pray
Which crumple and straighten for death.
These cold breezes
Carry the bells away on the air,
Stuttering tales of Gothic, and pass,
Catching new grave flowers into their hair
Beating the chapel and red-coloured glass. 


And here's another, very dark, and also new to me –

Suicide on Junction Road Station After Abstention from Evening Communion in North London

With the roar of the gas my heart gives a shout—
    To Jehovah Tsidkenu the praise!
Bracket and bracket go blazon it out
    In this Evangelical haze!

Jehovah Jireh! the arches ring,
    The Mintons glisten, and grand
Are the surpliced boys as they sweetly sing
    On the threshold of glory land.

Jehovah Nisi! from Tufnell Park,
    Five minutes to Junction Road,
Through grey brick Gothic and London dark,
    And my sins, a fearful load.

Six on the upside! six on the down side!
    One gaslight in the Booking Hall
And a thousand sins on this lonely station—
    What shall I do with them all?

'Jehovan Tsidkenu' means something like 'The Lord of Our Righteousness'; 'Jehovah Jireh' translates as 'The Lord Will Provide'; 'Jehovah Nisi' [usually Nissi] means 'The Lord Is My Banner'. Junction Road station no longer exists, and on its site stands, of all things, a Shaolin temple.