These words at the beginning of ‘A Subaltern's Love Song’ (or ‘Love-song’, ‘Contents’ (1958)) are probably the best known of all John Betjeman's well-loved lines. I had them by heart at the age of 13 after a single reading of the poem. Although the poem spoke of a social world quite unfamiliar to me (and I had no idea what a ‘Subaltern’ was), the rhythm and rhyme fixed themselves in my mind. Were the first lines composed on one of those steam-train journeys the poet so savoured? Miss-J.-Hun-ter-Dunn – wasn't that how those hissing, panting, clanking locomotives got under way, before slowly developing an even rhythm – ‘Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun’? And then there was the rhyme, prepared for and arrived at as an echo – exact, witty, haunting. The quatrain form, too, was compelling – a staple of the Victorian poets and the hymn-writers Betjeman loved, but around 1920 employed by the writer of another famous ‘Love Song’, Betjeman's ‘American master ’ T. S. Eliot, to devastating ironic effect when ‘Sweeney’ became ‘agonised’. Betjeman's own usage of the quatrain is familiar, humorous, and reassuring. A quirky, fantasizing story gets told, through controlled sound patterns, to alight on an idealized sense of an ending: ‘And now I'm engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn’ – a consummation as devoutly to be wished as the closure of a Romantic ode (‘And gathering swallows … ’) or a Victorian novel (‘Reader, I married him’).

In a century that has restlessly destabilized the formal poetic line (Imagism, The Waste Land, the Cantos, Ted Hughes's Crow, the ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’ experimenters …), Betjeman's work has consistently held to traditional boundaries, as if these constituted the essence of poetic Englishness. And, although his stanzaic forms have varied considerably, the quatrain appears to be the poet's core aesthetic shape. If four sections of the ‘Sir John Piers’ sequence are counted separately, I find around fifty quatrains in the 1958 Collected Poems – about a third of the total.