Ireland With Emily poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry

Bells are booming down the bohreens,

White the mist along the grass,

Now the Julias, Maeves and Maureens

Move between the fields to Mass.

Twisted trees of small green apple

Guard the decent whitewashed chapel,

Gilded gates and doorway grained,

Pointed windows richly stained

With many-coloured Munich glass.

See the black-shawled congregations

On the broidered vestment gaze

Murmer past the painted stations

As Thy Sacred Heart displays

Lush Kildare of scented meadows,

Roscommon, thin in ash-tree shadows,

And Westmeath the lake-reflected,

Spreading Leix the hill-protected,

Kneeling all in silver haze?

In yews and woodbine, walls and guelder,

Nettle-deep the faithful rest,

Winding leagues of flowering elder,

Sycamore with ivy dressed,

Ruins in demesnes deserted,

Bog-surrounded bramble-skirted –

Townlands rich or townlands mean as

These, oh, counties of them screen us

In the Kingdom of the West.

Stony seaboard, far and foreign,

Stony hills poured over space,

Stony outcrop of the Burren,

Stones in every fertile place,

Little fields with boulders dotted,

Grey-stone shoulders saffron-spotted,

Stone-walled cabins thatched with reeds,

Where a Stone Age people breeds

The last of Europe’s stone age race.

Has it held, the warm June weather?

Draining shallow sea-pools dry,

When we bicycled together

Down the bohreens fuchsia-high.

Till there rose, abrupt and lonely,

A ruined abbey, chancel only,

Lichen-crusted, time-befriended,

Soared the arches, splayed and splendid,

Romanesque against the sky.

There in pinnacled protection,

One extinguished family waits

A Church of Ireland resurrection

By the broken, rusty gates.

Sheepswool, straw and droppings cover,

Graves of spinster, rake and lover,

Whose fantastic mausoleum,

Sings its own seablown Te Deum,

In and out the slipping slates.

 

***

 

More poems by John Betjeman:

• Winter Seascape poem – John Betjeman poems
• Winter Landscape poem – John Betjeman poems
• Westgate-On-Sea poem – John Betjeman poems
• Verses Turned… poem – John Betjeman poems
• Upper Lambourne poem – John Betjeman poems
• Trebetherick poem – John Betjeman poems
• The Plantster’s Vision poem – John Betjeman poems
• The Olympic Girl poem – John Betjeman poems
• The Licorice Fields at Pontefract poem – John Betjeman poems
• The Last Laugh poem – John Betjeman poems
• The Irish Unionist’s farewell to Greta Hellastrom in 1922 poem – John Betjeman poems
• The Hon. Sec. poem – John Betjeman poems
• The Cottage Hospital poem – John Betjeman poems
• Sun and Fun poem – John Betjeman poems
• South London Sketch poem – John Betjeman poems
• Slough poem – John Betjeman poems
• Senex poem – John Betjeman poems
• Seaside Golf poem – John Betjeman poems
• On a Portrait of a Deaf Man poem – John Betjeman poems
• Myfanwy poem – John Betjeman poems
• Mortality poem – John Betjeman poems
• Middlesex poem – John Betjeman poems
• Meditation on the A30 poem – John Betjeman poems
• Loneliness poem – John Betjeman poems
• Ireland With Emily poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
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• In Westminster Abbey poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
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• Harrow-on-the-Hill poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
• Guilt poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
• Felixstowe, or The Last of Her Order poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
• Executive poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
• Dilton Marsh Halt poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
• Diary of a Church Mouse poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
• Devonshire Street W.1 poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
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