'Hassock and cassock, paraffin and pew...'

John Betjeman's birthday today – he was born on this day in 1906. Browsing the Collected Poems, I alighted on this one. It's an evocative piece for a church crawler (and occasional churchyard picnicker) like me, though the chances of finding a key under the mat of a locked church are now, sadly, zero. As so often with Betjeman, death is never far away (here in the 'sweet smell of cerements') and the innocence of the scene has a faintly erotic edge – or is that just me?

An Archaeological Picnic

In this high pasturage, this Blunden time,
  With Lady's Finger, Smokewort, Lovers' Loss,
And lin-lan-lone, a Tennysonian chime
  Stirring the sorrel and the gold-starred moss,
  Cool is the chancel, bright the altar cross.

Drink, Mary, drink your fizzy lemonade
  And leave the king-cups; take your grey felt hat;
Here, where the low-side window lends a shade,
  There, where the key lies underneath the mat,
  The rude forefathers of the hamlet sat.

Sweet smell of cerements and of cold wet stones,
  Hassock and cassock, paraffin and pew;
Green is a light which that sublime Burne-Jones
  White-hot and wondering from the glass-kiln drew,
  Gleams and re-gleams this Trans arcade anew.

So stand you waiting, freckled innocence!
  For me the squinch and squint and Trans arcade;
For you, where meadow grass is evidence,
  With flattened pattern, of our picnic made,
  One more bottle of fizzy lemonade.

I guess 'Blunden time' means a time of rural peace and quiet in picturesque surroundings, as in Edmund Blunden's pastoral poems.
The 'Tennysonian chime', 'lin-lan-lone', occurs in a poem written for music, Far-Far-Away – 'The mellow lin-lan-lone of evening bells...'
'Trans' – an abbreviation since hijacked for other uses – is short for Transitional (between Norman and Gothic).