POETS’ CORNER

Evening Star, Issue 22252, 1 February 1936, Page 2

POETS’ CORNER

[Written by Panache, for the ‘ Evening Star.’]

Kipling’s obsequies have been overshadowed, appropriately for an imperialist poet, by those of his King, but he has been laid to rest in Westminster Abbey with some pomp and ceremony, and the Poet Laureate has written his epitaph. He lies next to Hardy and near Dickens, which should please him, though in other parts of the Poet’s Corner there is dust that belongs to those whom ho would designate lesser breeds without the law. There is that fellow Macpherson, for example, celebrated by the Ossian hoax, and his claim to have discovered old Gaelic manuscripts. “Another proof of Scottish conspiracy in national falsehood,” said Dr Johnson. The Abbey acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.

Burial in the Abbey is associated with the shrine of Edward the Confessor, and the encyclopedias tell us that the practice of burying there court favourites and nobles began in the reign of Richard 11. . The first poet to be so honoured was Chaucer; but he owed his distinction as much to the fact that he was clerk of the works in the Abbey, and occupied a ■ house on the site of the chapel of Henry VII.; as to his poetry. What- . ever the reason, Chaucer’s burial . created a precedent for poets known . at court. In Elizabethan days a tablet •was erected with the inscription “ Heare lyes (expecting the second . comminge of our Saviour Christ Jesus) the body of Edmond Spenser, the Prince of Poets in his tyme.” Since then “ the poetical quarter” has become thickly populated. The Rev. Dr Brewer finds tills suburb of the, Abbey lacking in selection, and laments that the Poets’ Corner, should shelter other than poets—actors, . novelists, and critics. He breaks out: “It-would have been a glorious thing indeed if the corner had ’ been set apart for England’s poets. But alas! the Deans of Westminster have made a market of the wall, and hence, as a memorial of British poets, it is almost a caricature. Truly our Valhalla is almost a satire on our taste and judgment.” Then, like any clean sport criticising the selector’s cricket team, Dr Brewer takes exception to the personnel of the - Poets’ Corner, and draws up a team of his own. That Prior should b© honoured by bust, statue, tablet, or monument he considers a most preposterous affair, and he is scandalised at the inclusion of such miserable poetasters as Davenant and Shadwell. With some of Dr Brewer’s selection no one will quarrel, but poetry fans to-day will not understand why he includes Mrs Hemans, Thomas Hood, and Southey. Certainly they themselves would have been pleased, but another of Dr Brewer’s choice, Andrew Marvell, would not. The Poet’s porner is one of the institutions that it would be very difficult-to annihilate to a green thought in a green shade. Though many, of the poets are celebrated only by memorial tablets, others have tombs in the Abbey, and this century, in spite of all the arts of the embalmers, sniffs rather suspiciously. Three hundred years ago there was congestion, so that one with the sensibilities of a minor poet was moved to implore: Renowned Spenser, lie a thought more high To learned Chaucer: and rare Beaumont lie A little nearer Spenser to make room for Shakespeare. Ben Johnson protested that such a closing up of the ranks was unnecessary ; but Shakespeare, anticipating his admirers, had already chosen his tomb at Stratford-on-Avon, with a neat curse directed at any who might be tempted to move his bones. Wordsw'orth likewise is buried in his own Grasmere, and has a memorial in -the Abbey. Sir William Temple pleased his home and his country by having his heart laid in a silver box and placed under the sundial in his garden, and the-rest of him buried l in Poets’ Corner. Th« list of those who are commemorated,! h the Abbey, from Chaucer to Kipling, is long, and with a few exceptions, eminently respectable. That it was the ambition of the deans of Westminster to keep it respectable rather than poetic is obvious, for when Byron’s friends asked that he should be buried there the application was refused. When the greatest names are set aside, they are a prosy lot in the Poets’ Corner. Pope is in his family vault at Twickenham, because he was no Protestant. Donne is buried in his own St. Paul’s. Unexpectedly in the Poet’s Corner is the graceless John Gay. Perhaps the Dean nodded, and Gay

may have had his tomb in mind when he wrote the epitaph for himself: Life is a jest and all things show it: I thought so once, and now I know it. Gay leavens the lump, and so does Sheridan, who is included by poetic justice. It is refreshing to read of Sheridan that he died" overburdened with debts and was buried in Westminster Abbey. The ghost of Byron will have few regrets that he was blackballed for the Poets’ Corner, for the atmosphere of the south transept is not lyrical. Keats and Shelley lie in the English cemetery in Rome; the South Seas lap round Stevenson, and the tideless inland sea round Rupert Brooke. Westminster Abbey is consecrated to the old rather than the young. There is no welcome there for marvellous boys, or for young men stabbed in tavern brawls. The Poets’ Corner does not yearn for poets that are intenselv individual. Blake is not buried there, nor Burns; neither Coleridge nor Swinburne. The south transept of the Abbey is a very conservative club, a dlub for which any modern poet would decline to have his name nut up. When his arteries harden he may think differently; but while he is it is all one to him, as it was to Sir Thomas Browne, whether he lies in St. Innocent Churchyard or in the sands of Egypt.