Betjeman's ‘Dawn of Guilt ’ has everything to do with fathers and sons, as with sons and ‘lovers’, and the labelling ‘fourth generation’ is repeated in Summoned by Bells. Paternal law becomes reinforced by maternal blackmail: ‘ “He is your father, John!” ’ (SBB 85) – and elsewhere: ‘ “When I am dead you will be sorry, John” ’ (SBB 60). Early on in this autobiographical poem, an issue is made of the patriarchal name – German or Dutch? One ‘n’ or two at the end? Where now political correctness might prefer the name ‘Betjeperson’ to Betjemann (the father's spelling) or Betjeman (the poet's), nationalist correctness, at that time, concerned possible Germanicity – ‘ “Betjeman's a German spy – ” ’ (SBB 28). This now appears rather Riddle of the Sands stuff, yet it is arguably similar to Sylvia Plath's conflictual ambivalence about her name, her father, and her Germanic inheritance (‘Ich, ich, ich, ich’). Critics have followed the poet's lead in highlighting this odd importance of the poet's surname (apparently the derivation was German), but less remarked is the way the Christian name ‘John’ is almost invariably deployed in the poem as a reinforcement of exhortation, accusation, reproval, or condescension. It punctuates the text like a bell-toll of imputed blame. Perhaps the main transition in the ‘Cricket Master ’ addendum is that suddenly ‘John’ is replaced by ‘Sir ’. However disillusioning his later prospects, at least the ‘artist’ is not quite now a ‘young man’.

General public perceptions about poetry have peculiarly interesting relevance to the theme of masculinity – which I take to be a core motif in Summoned by Bells. For instance, in 1995 a British television poll connected with ‘Poetry Week’ found that the nation's favourite poems were: (1) Rudyard Kipling's ‘If ’; (2) Alfred Lord Tennyson's ‘The Lady of Shalott’; (3) Walter de la Mare's ‘The Listeners’. In more recent polls such poems have remained highly popular. The 1995 national ‘Number 1’ poem constitutes, in fact, a versified do-it-yourself construction kit for mainstream male Englishness. It can be summed up as, ‘Keep your head – and be a real man’.