ENGLAND’S LAUREATE

Greymouth Evening Star, 14 January 1933, Page 10

ENGLAND’S LAUREATE

AN AMUSING SKIT An English writer appears to think that poets are taken too seriously, not to mention that they take themselves so. The writer is C. E. Bechhofer Roberts, who contributes a page on ‘Might-Have-Been Affairs’ to the newly reorganised “Saturday Review.” “A good many people regard the poem in which Mr.- -John Masefield announced his resignation of the Poet Laureateship as the greatest of his works,” writes Mr. Roberts of the mythical resignation which is his starting point. “While 1 am not sure that I altogether agree with this. I am bound to admit that the last verse at any rate, offers an exhilarating example of the two main tendencies of Mr. Masefield’s muse:- —

Beauty calleth me; At birded dawn and mothy eve And noon when rich-hued blow-flies leave Their faery brood upon the meat And nymphs and fawns to grots retreat, Beauty calleth me. This is the honest truth, so why the heck Must I bestride the Muses’ quarterdeck And sing of royal births and jubilees And how the Prince’s dog was bit by fleas And how the Aga Khan’s outsider won The Stewards’ Cup is 1941 ? So you can keep your blasted Malmsey— Beauty calleth me. “When the post became vacant, the National Government characteristically decided to appoint a Commission to choose a successor to Mr. Masefield. The members of the Commission were Mr. Eddie March, whose whole-hearted championship of contemporary minor poets has made him so popular with them; Miss Megan Lloyd George, whose hereditary claims to a bardic chair are universally acknowledged in Welsh and other Nonconformist literary circles; Mr. Maurice Baring, himself a poet and a diplomat; and Mr. Vernon Bartlett, representing the British Broadcasting Company, and thus pledged to love the highest when he heard about it. “After the Commission had been in existence for eight months, and had met three times, it announced that it could reach no unanimous conclusion. The Cqfcinet therefore decided to submit the poem which each judge had selected to a joint session of both Houses of Parliament, which were afterwards to elect the next Poet Laureate. The first poem read was (not) by Mr. Humbert Walfe. This: —

I sat in my Whitehall office and the dusty files under my hand said, “Are you going to do any work this morning?” when it was my real intention to write some verses about people who sit in Whitehall offices and write verse and reviews, or stand in theatre bars and criticise plays. So I looked derisively at the files and said, “Do wait another week or two; taxpayers are patient, and I am so found of poetry.”

Then followed Miss Lloyd George’s choice, “a poem by Mr. AV. H. Davies, who, as a Welshman, was the candidate most favoured by all the Welsh members of both Houses”: “What joy it is to be a poet! The very birds and beasties know it. When on leafy thorn the snail Doth leave behind a slimy trail, AVhen cuckoos clink their pannikin And sardines snuggle in their tin, And doggies chase a tin on tail, And catties on the roof-top wail, All nature then is poetry, When seen by beggars such as me. A sterner note was struck when Mr. Maurice Baring’s choice was announced, and the Clerk read a poem written in collaboration by Mr. Hilaire Belloc, Mr. Theodore Maynard, Mr. J. B. Morton, and several others of that school of poetry. It went thus; We seize our staff, our manly staff; we sing our manly song; Our needs are few; we hate a Jew; but oh! our lungs are strong! Just give us bread and beer and God and the turf of the Epsom downs And we will give you yeoman songs that you never hear in towns. The yeoman is the breath of life; he builds the beech and birch; He brews the beer, he bakes the bread, he battles for his Church— The old, true Church, the only Church, the Church where we belong; Bue since no yeomen walk the Downs, they cannot hear our song. Oh, we are friends, the Downs and we and beer and God and bread, And Heaven knows the calm there’ll be on earth when we are dead; But horrid men, and dogs, and. Jews, who do each other wrong Will hear the thunder in the sky and tremble at our song.

When the echoes of this masterpiece had died away, the Clerk announced that the 8.8. C. had heard that Mr. T. S. Eliot, was the greatest living poet in the English tongue, and that, as a result, Mr. Vernon Bartlett had chosen Mr. Eliot’s prize-poem as his selection. It was then read, as follows: —

Three blind mice— Just creatures like the rest of us, Hampered by physical disabilities (probably hereditary) but doing their best to find consolation in obscure metaphysical cogitations. They hurry along the gutter And utter Little squeaks of astonishment to find that men are so like them. But Angelina. Pampelmoose says she loves me. She looks at me with her up-turned nose quivering like the cowl on a chimney. 1 recognise the look. I have seen it on the lace ot a farmer’s wife .As she sharpens a knife And slowly, relentlessly, without the slightest inkling that she is a philosophic figure, prepares to solve the mice’s metaphysical perplexities. That’s life. The Lords and Commons, being then informed that they were to elect the next Poet Laureate by secret ballot, chose, to the delight of the public, Mr. Rudyard Kipling.