Poem - Ireland With Emily (John Betjeman)

In Tulira in County Galway, Betjeman met Lord Hemphill and his beautiful American wife Emily. She had met her husband while riding in the Borghese Gardens in Rome in 1926. Though a brilliant horsewoman, she had taken a fall, Lord Hemphill, riding by, had instantly leapt from his horse and run to her assistance. A year later they married in New York and moved to Tulira, the Victorian house built by Edward Martyn and immortalised in George Moore's Hail and Farewell.

Emily was in love with a man not her husband when she met Betjeman - and she subsequently married him - Ion Villiers-Stuart. Betjeman was obliged to worship from afar, but on one afternoon he went for a bicycle ride with her through the strange primeval-looking landscape of the Burren in County Clare. It produced one of the best evocations of Irish landscape, and of the 'feel' of rural Ireland ever written - 'Ireland with Emily'


Ireland with Emily


Stony seaboard, far and foreign,
Stony hills poured over space,
Stony outcrop of the Burren,
Stones in every fertile place,
Little fields with boulders dotted,
Grey-stone shoulders saffron-spotted,
Stone-walled cabins thatched with reeds,
Where a Stone Age people breeds
The last of Europe's stone age race,

Has it held, the June warm weather?

Draining shallow-seapools dry,

When we bicycled together

Down the bohreens fuchsia-high.

Till there rose, abrupt and lonely,

A ruined abbey, chancel only,

Lichen-crusted time-befriended,

Soared the arches, splayed and splendid,

Romanesque against the sky ...

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John Betjeman

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When the Betjeman's left Ireland, Betj continued to write to Emily, saying he would cross the water for her, but this was a dream, and in England he found other, more available female company.