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others – and Housman had conformed. And yet this drab little man – who still affected the Norfolk jacket and elastic-sided boots and little cap he had worn when he was young – was a pervert, an iconoclast and a blasphemer. Ruthless as an editor, he was pitiless as a critic and contemptuous of all honour and praise. He refused the Order of Merit, and of a colleague who said of him that he was the greatest living Latin scholar, Housman said, ‘Well, if I were, he would not know it.’ That was one of his voices. But we end with the other.

When summer’s end is nighing
    (
from
Last Poems)
    When summer’s end is nighing
    And skies at evening cloud,
    I muse on change and fortune
    And all the feats I vowed
    When I was young and proud.
    The weathercock at sunset
    Would lose the slanted ray,
    And I would climb the beacon
    That looked to Wales away
    And saw the last of day.
    From hill and cloud and heaven
    The hues of evening died;
    Night welled through lane and hollow
    And hushed the countryside,
    But I had youth and pride.
    And I with earth and nightfall
    In converse high would stand,
    Late, till the west was ashen
    And darkness hard at hand,
    And the eye lost the land.
    The year might age, and cloudy
    The lessening day might close,
    But air of other summers
    Breathed from beyond the snows,
    And I had hope of those.
    They came and were and are not
    And come no more anew;
    And all the years and seasons
    That ever can ensue
    Must now be worse and few.
    So here’s an end of roaming
    On eves when autumn nighs:
    The ear too fondly listens
    For summer’s parting sighs,
    And then the heart replies.

John Betjeman

    1906–1984
    John Betjeman was born in North London, the only child of affluent parents. He was educated at Marlborough and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where his friends included Auden and MacNeice. He left without taking a degree. At twenty-five, he began writing for the
Architectural Review
and, throughout his life, held passionate views about architecture. Other freelance work included the Shell Guides on Cornwall and Devon and film criticism for the London
Evening Standard
(he later described himself in
Who’s Who
as ‘a poet and a hack’). His first collection of verse,
Mount Zion
, appeared in 1931, followed by collections including
New Bats in Old Belfries, A Few Late Chrysanthemums, A Nip in the Air, High and Low
and his blank-verse autobiography
Summoned by Bells
. His
Collected Poems
were published in 1958, the first edition selling over 100,000 copies. He was knighted in 1969 and appointed Poet Laureate in 1972. He died in Cornwall in 1984.

Hunter Trials
    It’s awf’lly bad luck on Diana,
    Her ponies have swallowed their bits;
    She fished down their throats with a spanner
    And frightened them all into fits.
    So now she’s attempting to borrow.
    Do
lend her some bits, Mummy,
do
;
    I’ll lend her my own for to-morrow,
    But to-day
I
’ll be wanting them too.
    Just look at Prunella on Guzzle,
    The wizardest pony on earth;
    Why doesn’t she slacken his muzzle
    And tighten the breech in his girth?
    I say, Mummy, there’s Mrs Geyser
    And doesn’t she look pretty sick?
    I bet it’s because Mona Lisa
    Was hit on the hock with a brick.
    Miss Blewitt says Monica threw it,
    But Monica says it was Joan,
    And Joan’s very thick with Miss Blewitt,
    So Monica’s sulking alone.
    And Margaret failed in her paces,
    Her withers got tied in a noose,
    So her coronets caught in the traces
    And now all her fetlocks are loose.
    Oh, it’s me now. I’m terribly nervous.
    I wonder if Smudges will shy.
    She’s practically certain to swerve as
    Her Pelham is over one eye.

    Oh wasn’t it naughty of Smudges?
    Oh, Mummy, I’m sick with disgust.
    She threw me in front of the Judges,
    And my silly old collarbone’s bust.

    Writers like to elude their public, lead them a bit of a dance. They take them down untrodden paths, land