Myfanwy - David Essex - John Betjeman - A Tribute.

Music - Poetry
David Essex's beautiful rendition of Myfanwy brings life to John Betjeman's sometimes controversial poem.
You only have to look at Betjeman's "Myfanwy" - one of his most emotionally naked - to feel the camera leading you effortlessly back and forth across the generations, as the grown Myfanwy bicycles "out of the shopping and into the dark, / Back down the avenue, back to the pottingshed, / Back to the house on the fringe of the park", where the adolescent Betjeman first saw and fell in love with her, playing sardines at a party. Before we reach the Fuller's angelcake we see the motherly Myfanwy once more, reading to her own children.
The poem collapses the generations with such assurance. The montage of images, immediately moving, only gradually reveals its meaning as the generations extricate themselves at subsequent readings. The confusion echoes his own slight embarrassment. Is she a child or a mother? Is she a girl he once knew and lost touch with and longs for still, remembering her childhood beauty? Or just the wife of a friend? It has been said somewhere about the need to give the reader something to be going along with, while reserving something more to repay closer scrutiny. Betjeman manages this with cinematic blurrings of time and space and all brought to you through David's magic interpretation of Myfanwy.

[@MadZoltan1]

Brilliant

[@robrob253]

The very best interpretation of this poem I've heard, it took music to do this