...Ronald Hughes Wright, come with me once again
Bicycling off to churches in the town:
St. Andrew's first, with neo-Norman apse,
St. Old's--distinctly Evangelical--
And, Lower still, St Ebbe's, which smelt of gas.
In New Inn Hall Street dare the double doors,
Partitions and red baize till stands revealed
Peter-le-Bailey's Irish gothic nave.
   St. Giles' had still a proper fair-ground air,
For Oxford once had been a Cotswold town
Standing in water meadows of the Thames:
The cattle moaned in pens on Gloucester Green;
In George Street there were country cottages;
And thy weak Dec., St. George-the-Martyr's church,
Prepared us for our final port of call--
St. Aloysius of the Church of Rome.
Its incense, reliquaries, brass and lights
Made all seem plain and trivial back at school.
   One lucky afternoon in Chaundy's shop
I bought a book with tipped-in colour plates--
'City of Dreaming Spires' or some such name--
Soft late-Victorian water-colours framed
Against brown paper pages. Thus it was
'Sunset in Worcester Gardens' meant for me
Such beauty in that black and shallow pool
That even today, when from the ilex tree
I see its shining length, I fail to hear
The all-too-near and omnipresent train.
The Founder's Tower in Magdalen still seems drowned
In red Virginia creeper, and The High
Has but one horse-tram down its famous length,
While a gowned Doctor of Divinity
Enters the porch of Univ.; Christ Church stairs
(A single column supporting the intricate roof),
Wallflowers upon the ruined city wall,
Wistaria-mantled buildings in St. John's--
All that was crumbling, picturesque and quaint
Informed my taste and sent me biking off,
Escaped from games, for Architecture bound....



...Failed in Divinity! Oh count the hours
Spent on my knees in Cowley, Pusey House,
St. Barnabas', St. Mary Mag's, St. Paul's,
Revering chasuables and copes and albs!
Consider what I knew of 'High' and 'Low'...
Failed in Divinity! O, towers and spires!
Could no one help ? Was nothing to be done ?
No. No one. Nothing. Mercilessly calm,
The Cherwell carried under Magdalen Bridge
Its leisured puntfuls of the fortunate
Who next term and the next would still come back.
Could no one help ? I'd seen myself a don,
Reading old poets in the library,
Attending chapel in an M.A. gown
And sipping vintage port by candlelight.
I sought my tutor in his arid room,
Who told me, "You'd have only got a Third."
I wandered into Blackwell's, where my bill
Was so enormous that it wasn't paid
Till ten years later, from the small estate
My father left. Not even dusty shelves
Of folios of architectural plates
Could comfort me. Outside, the sunny Broad,
The mouldering busts round the Sheldonian,
The hard Victorian front of Exeter,
The little colleges that front the Turl,
The lean acacia tree in Trinity,
Stood strong and confident, outlasting me...

Extracts from 'Summoned by Bells' the verse autobiography of Sir John Betjeman.