A simple, clear, and delight-producing poem of John Betjeman is Diary of a Church Mouse. The speaker is of course the diarist, a lean and hungry mouse who writes in couplets mostly of iambic tetrameter
The mouse gets by alone most days in a “dark forgotten room” that is a storage place for discarded cassocks and old hassocks. He subsists on eating the pages of discarded prayer books; “sawdust mixed with straw” is as near as he can come to bread, and floor polish is his jelly.
He comments that “Christmas and Easter may be feasts/ For congregations and for priests.”, also Whitsun or Pentecost, which comes seven weeks after Easter. He adds that “For me the only feast at all/ Is Autumn’s Harvest Festival.” In America that is the last Thursday of November, Thanksgiving. In England, Harvest Festival is both a church affair and a secular revel, when the end of harvest is celebrated with people bringing baskets of fruit and vegetables to decorate their local church and then to be distributed to the poor.
At this time the diarist can dine on “ears of corn around the [baptismal] font” and “burrow through a loaf of bread.” However, during Harvest Festival:
. . . how annoying when one finds
That other mice with pagan minds
Come into church my food to share
Who have no proper business there.
The mouse mentions two field mice, an unfriendly rat who steals off with a sheaf of wheat, “prosperous mice from fields away” who come to hear the organ music and
Ate through the altar’s sheaf of oats.
A Low Church mouse, who thinks that I
Am too papistical, and High,
Yet somehow doesn’t think it wrong
To munch through Harvest Evensong.
Meanwhile, our resident church mouse who starves most of the year has to share his food with these rodents that go to church only at Harvest Festival time and are either atheistic or have no interest in being baptized.
The mouse concludes with his comment on the human churchgoers who like himself go to church every Sunday, read daily from the Bible, and pray morning and night. But oddly the church at harvest Festival is filled with people he has never seen all the rest of the year.
The diarist merely finds it “strange to me”, but John Betjeman clearly intends some satire of those who come to church only at Harvest Festival time as a preamble to the secular celebration involving more dining, copious drinking and romance. He also, through the Low Church mouse, manages a dig at the division of the Anglican church.
2nd essay:
John Betjeman's “Diary of a Church Mouse” is a satire of religion told through the eyes of a rodent who is more than meets the eye. The poem use rhyming couplets to showcase Betjeman's distinctive comic style.
“Behind this Church of England baize” indicates that the speaker is a follower of Anglicanism. Betjeman himself hailed from England. Confirmation that the author believes in the Eucharist is also found in the last lines of his poem “Christmas”. The speaker is a mouse who admits, "I nibble through old service books”. The mouse lives outside the knowledge of the staff and is naïve about what is really going on. This ignorance will be put to comic effect later in the poem.
Betjeman anthropomorphizes the rodents in the poem with lines such as “…other mice with pagan minds/come into church my food to share/who have no proper business there”. This tool is used to show the hypocrisy of Anglicans who don’t want to share their church with the casual attendees. The mouse who “must starve all year long” feels a sense of ownership and doesn’t like the large rat who questions his religious habits. Betjeman means to poke fun at the scene since all are truly welcome in a place of God.
A second, perhaps more plausible, explanation of the poem’s lines is that less devout attendees are tearing down religion. The poem does support this line of thinking since rodents are literally eating up the Book of Common Prayer. Is Betjeman warning that those who seldom show up to their pews take the sense of ceremony away from religious services?
The mouse lives “Here among long-discarded cassocks/ Damp stools, and half-split open hassocks/Here where the vicar never looks/.” He is content with his faith alone and privations don’t worry him, “the cleaner never bothers me”. Betjeman cleverly suggests that the mouse transforms straw and sawdust into bread as does God. Is the meek mouse with the monastic lifestyle a holy symbol? It is interesting, but the poem probably does not lend adequate support to this theory.
Betjeman's mouse sees life as a trial to be endured while those around him live in a less pious fashion. Even the priests themselves enjoy Whitsun, a holiday with Pagan origins, while the noble mouse abstains. During the Harvest Festival, when English farmers traditionally give bread to churches in appreciation, the speaker takes his sole worldly pleasure. At this time, other rodents with pagan minds, i.e. different or less zealous beliefs, begin to show up. An atheist rat comes to services much to the speaker's chagrin.
In the final lines, the mouse compares rodent religiosity to that of humans, “Within the human world I know/Such goings-on could not be so/For human beings only do/What their religion tells them to/." The provincial ideas of the mouse are used to call into question characteristics of human belief. The audience knows that services are not compulsory, but the mouse does not. Betjeman is either being critical of those who lax in religion or is trying to paint a picture of the mouse as ill-informed about the changing dynamic of religious worship. Like all worthwhile poetry, some ambiguity persists even in the light of analysis.