'Subaltern' Sunset: British Poet's Muse Passes On at Age 92

LONDON, April 17 -- She was an innocent beauty working in the catering department of a wartime ministry. He was making government films by day and writing poems at night.

Their eyes met; something clicked.

A poem soon followed -- and "A Subaltern's Love Song" became the most popular work of John Betjeman, one of his generation's most loved poets.

Joan Hunter Dunn, the muse who inspired the classic poem of love and longing, died in a London nursing home last week at age 92. She changed her name after she married and was known as Joan Jackson.

But she will be forever associated with the poem that captured her in the first bloom of youth.

In the poem, the narrator describes, with subtle suggestions of sexual desire, an idyllic day in the countryside with Joan Hunter Dunn that ends with the pair becoming engaged after a spirited game of tennis and a drive through the British countryside.

The poem depicts a vanished world in which young men observe proper etiquette, struggle with their eveningwear, attend dances at the village hall and mark the end of the day with a lime juice and gin at precisely 6 p.m. This was romance before reality TV.

Describing how she defeats him at tennis, the narrator writes:

Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,

The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,

With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,