3 - The Last of England

Summary

Dear old, bloody old England

Of telegraph poles and tin,

Seemingly so indifferent

And with so little soul to win.

What sort of church, I wonder?

The path is a grassy mat,

And grass is drowning the headstones

Sloping this way and that.

(CP 141)

These lines from ‘A Lincolnshire Church’ come from the 1948 collection Selected Poems. The poem represents quintessential Betjeman, as generally perceived. In thundery weather, the protagonist (both architectural connoisseur and spiritual penitent) approaches the church – surrounded by a ‘sprinkle of villas’, where a woman stands (smoking, and resentful of Americans). He enters, assesses the interior detailing, ponders on the God who inspired the building, and kneels to pray for forgiveness. The social moment is exact. Power has passed from the UK to the USA, ‘Austerity ’ lurks as the ‘wireless croons’, slacks are in fashion, and telegraph poles hedge about the dire church restoration of ‘eighteen-eighty-eight’. However, the church (‘Middle Pointed’) stands for an Englishness far older than the British Empire, rooted in Christian belief and in the specifics of a particular locality: ‘the wide green marsh’. There is a ‘postmodern’ feel to this sponsorship of marginal particularity. And there is a ‘postcolonial’ resonance in the poem's surprise conclusion. For in ‘lowering sunlight’ stands an ‘Indian Christian priest ’. The speaker speculates on the priest 's journey (spiritual as well as geographical) to this time, this place. The poem affirms him as a friend of God. As the Bhagavad-Gita is woven into the deliberate Anglicizing of the ‘American master ‘s’ Four Quartets, so the ‘lighted East’ is here made emblematic of an immigrant pilgrim. Betjeman here shows himself to be an early poet of multiculturalism.

It is possible that ‘A Lincolnshire Church’ is playing off Eliot's ‘Little Gidding’; but it is equally possible that Eliot's fourth section of Four Quartets may relate back to Betjeman's earlier ‘Exeter’ or ‘Holy Trinity, Sloane Street’.