Death in Leamington by John Betjeman - Hellesdon.org

Death in Leamington by John Betjeman
Genre Poem
Keywords Aging, Caregivers, Death and Dying, Grief, Human Worth, Loneliness, Mourning,
Nursing
Summary
A nurse enters an elderly woman's bedroom. "Wake up! It's nearly five," she cries.
Does she mean five AM, or is it afternoon teatime? The nurse lets the window blinds
unroll and puts some coal on the fire in the fireplace.
In fact, the patient is dead. She had died the previous evening, "by the light of the
ev'ning star." Setting aside her "chintzy cheeriness," the nurse begins to pay attention.
She looks "at the gray, decaying face," realizing what has happened. Her response is
simply to straighten up a bit and leave the room. [28 lines]
Commentary This poem is infused with loneliness and despair. Death is inevitable, of course, but we
yearn for our lives to make a difference in the world, and for our deaths to have
meaning. The only thing we know about this woman's life narrative is that she died
alone, and, at least within the frame of these 8 quatrains, there is no one to mourn
her. Life goes on. Though her death was certainly expected, she had lived in a world of
"chintzy cheeriness." No one was willing to acknowledge that the plaster of the house
was falling, or the inevitability that the old woman's heart would stop.
Source The Collected Poems
Publisher John Murray
Edition 1958
Place
London
Published
Annotated by Coulehan, Jack
John Betjeman's development as a poet has been slow and—since he writes in a number
of contrasted styles, and is liable to revert, in his later work, to earlier techniques and
mannerisms—not very easy to summarize. During a period of thirty years or so the
quality of his sensibility has changed very little, though his verse as a whole shows a
steady improvement in prosodic technique.
The first poem in the Collected Poems, 'Death in Leamington', is presumably one of his
earliest, and may be assigned to the late twenties or very early thirties. This description
of an old lady's death in a decrepit Victorian villa already foreshadows most of his later
preoccupations: nineteenth-century architecture, the niceties of social usage and
vocabulary and the details of English upper-middle-class domesticity; significantly, too,
the poem has that element of the macabre which will recur frequently throughout his
work, for Betjeman is—as T. S. Eliot has said of Webster—'much possessed by death'.
She died in the upstairs bedroom
By the light of the ev'ning star
That shone through the plate glass windows
From over Leamington Spa.
Beside her the lonely crochet
Lay patiently and unstirred,
But the fingers that would have work'd it
Were dead as the spoken word.
1

Death in Leamington by John Betjeman
And Nurse came in with the tea-things
Breast high 'mid the stands and chairs—
But Nurse was alone with her own little soul,
And the things were alone with theirs....
And 'Tea !' she said in a tiny voice
'Wake up ! It's nearly five.'
Oh ! Chintzy, chintzy cheeriness,
Half dead and half alive ! . . .
The contractions—'ev'ning', 'work'd'—are habitual with Betjeman, and like many of his
other mannerisms carry an echo of minor Victorian verse. Later poems on similar themes
tend to be less mannered, and it is interesting to compare 'Death in Leamington' with
'Remorse' (1954), of which I quote the first two stanzas:
The lungs draw in the air and rattle it out again;
The eyes revolve in their sockets and upwards stare;
No more worry and waiting and troublesome doubt again—
She whom I loved and left is no longer there.
The nurse puts down her knitting and walks across to her
With quick professional eye she surveys the dead.
Just one patient the less and little the loss to her,
Distantly tender she settles the shrunken head....
Here the slightly mocking tone of 'Leamington' has given place to a genuine compassion;
the verse, moreover, is tauter and more firmly controlled, and the whole poem is a far
more proficient piece of work, though some of Betjeman's admirers may regret the
casual, rather amateurish quality which gave the earlier poems a charm of their own.
[Jocelyn Brooke]
At Oxford, Betjeman was fortunate in meeting such poetic luminaries as Louis MacNeice and
W.H. Auden, but although of the same vintage, never identified himself with what became
known as the MacSpaunday Group, MacNeice and Auden being joined eponymously with
Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis, all very left wing politically and sometimes
Communist, expressing their sympathy with the Spanish Civil War of the late nineteen-thirties
with its overture for Hitler's ambitions.
Betjeman's stance in poetry may have found some inspiration in Eliot's view that 'the business
of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working up into
poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all'. Although Betjeman, at
times, used a gentle satire, he could express genuine sympathy over sadness as in Death in
Leamington and The Death of King George V. His spiritual strength, although shot through
with some humour and the odd whimsy, was always coming to the surface. He was never
cynical, malicious or scornful; he was, at heart, an 'old softie', in later life appearing to some
as fuddy-duddy and bumbling. Yet he epitomized the view of Samuel Johnson that to a poet,
nothing can be useless.
2

Death in Leamington by John Betjeman
Betjeman's first volume, Mount Zion, appeared in 1933, when he was 27 and his final actual
new collection came out in 1954, thirty years before his death, although his booklet Poems in
the Porch (Diary of a Church Mouse) came out concurrently to achieve a kind of finality and
wide recognition. Naturally, there were over a dozen unpublished poems written in the thirty
years before his death.
Betjeman had become an immensely popular poet with the result that, along the way, sundry
slim volumes appeared containing his poems, eg. High and Low (1966), A Nip in the Air
(1974), Church Poems (1981) and Uncollected Poems (1981). It is, of course, difficult to
select poems which are thought, for one reason or another, outstanding but many people not
really interested in poetry remember his often quoted Slough:
Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
[Randle Manwaring]
1930: Begins work at the "Architectural Review" magazine and helps promote modern styles by
Le Corbusier and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Wrote "Death in Leamington" for the London
Mercury.
3