A Little Book of Bourgeois Verse

By way of the excellent AbeBooks, I have acquired a copy of Continual Dew: A Little Book of Bourgeois Verse, Betjeman's first commercially published collection (1937) – not the prohibitively expensive first edition, but a beautifully made facsimile from 1977, complete with gold fore-edge and India-paper insert. It's pleasingly illustrated too, with an arresting cover by E. McKnight Kauffer, and embellishments by Osbert Lancaster, Hubert de Cronin Hastings and others. I was surprised to discover how many of Betjeman's best-known poems are in this early volume, including the ever popular 'Slough' ('Come, friendly bombs...') and perhaps his finest poem, 'The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel'. What is also striking is how death-fixated the young poet was, and how dark some of his work already was. As well as the relatively well-known, beautifully controlled 'Death in Leamington', there is this one, new to me – For Nineteenth-Century BurialsThis cold weatherCarries so many old…