The Bards of Britain

“Jesus was a carpenter
Buddha was a Prince
Muhammed was a merchant man
The last, none other since”
From The Halwa Papers
by Bachchoo

A national poet is an oddity and apart from Britain I don’t think any country has one. Britain’s government, on behalf of the monarch appoints a Poet Laureate, a sort of primus or prima inter pares of the profession. The title comes from the classical idea of the laurel wreath, the crown placed on the heads of heroes.
The laureate, deemed part of the Royal Household, is traditionally expected to write poems marking state occasions. The first named Poet Laureate was Sir William Davenant appointed in 1638. My education in literature was limited enough to have missed out on the works of this worthy.
I am sure the internet will pour out his work, but I prefer to look him up in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, because it’s editors will have done some work of selection and I won’t be bored with or confused and confounded by the endless stream of unstratified information that I can conjure from the ether.
Unguided reading is not always but can be a waste of time.
As a teenager in Pune, bored with cycling around with my gang, drinking endless cups of teas and fantasising about girls, I joined the Albert Edward Institute. It was a lending library based in an old bungalow, a relic of the Raj with three rooms full of musty books and a verandah where the ancient members sat on easy-chairs and read newspapers.
That was not a place for young men. Most of its members were senior citizens, shuffling old men who appeared to me as though they didn’t need to read the news of the day and yet were avidly doing it. The bald librarian in his shabby cotton jacket, entered the names of the borrowed books in a large unused ledger left over from other decades. There were never more than two or three apart from myself browsing through books to borrow.
I was a stubborn borrower and reader. I had no one to compare notes with and had not come across the notion of criticism or classification of what I read. A book was either engaging, boring, difficult or easy. In my reading no work was associated with the date when it was written. I read through the shelf of Thomas Hardy’s works starting from the left and finishing with the last volume on the right, from his first novel Desperate Remedies to the later greater ones.
I moved on to Marie Corelli, not knowing that she was deemed in other places, other rooms, an entertainer, whereas Hardy was considered “literature”. I read Earl Stanley Gardner, cases of it, and adopted the phrase “incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial” in arguments with my sister, aunts or friends. I read Dickens, Jane Austen, Luke Short and Max Brand and made no differentiation between them. They were all stories.
It was much later that I began to read critics and reviewers, at first in the magazine Encounter and picked up some notions of discrimination and even a certain snobbery, looking up to Albert Camus, down to Grace Metallious and sideways to P.G. Wodehouse.
The point of this digression, dear reader, was to acquaint you with one of the reasons for distrusting the much trafficked but uncharted oceans of the Internet.
So back to Davenant who is quoted in the Oxford book with lines such as:
“In ev’ry grave make room, make room
The world’s at an end, and we come, we come.”
This is from a poem called Law against Lovers. Now I know that such a law exists and it has often made me sad, but this poet’s lines, with the ambiguity that contemporary usage gives his lines, makes me smile.
There are two other quotes in the Oxford Dictionary from Sir William. They are not Shakespeare on a good day but not so bad that I shan’t look him up in anthologies — or on the internet. Just to find out what he said about Royal occasions.
The last but one laureate, Ted Hughes, for whose work one should have tremendous respect, accepted the post with an unspoken agreement that he would be a sort of national poet and do his own work rather than be an elevated, literate court jester to Queen Elizabeth’s household. Hughes held the title that Wordsworth and Tennyson had held before him. These premier league poets didn’t mark every move of the Georgian and Victorian monarchy with verses, principally because Britain’s monarchy was being eroded by the advance of the democratic will and monarchy was steadily becoming Royalty.
Today there is no “monarchy” left, only Royalty.
The person who holds the title at present, Carol Ann Duffy has, through her agent told the press that she will not be writing a poem for the engagement and forthcoming marriage of Prince William to Kate Middleton. I don’t think Ms Duffy gave any reason for her forbearance. Perhaps, she doesn’t have the time; perhaps, she feels it would reduce her function to a rent-a-verse greetings-card writer or perhaps, she is, despite having accepted the wages (albeit, till recently, only a case of good wine), a closet republican who despises the Royals and won’t do them any homage.
Nevertheless, I think Prince William and Ms Middleton deserve a bit of versifying if only because they seem to be merrily lining up for a life of luxury marred by the daunting constraints of decorum and duty.
Also when Ms Duffy retires — or is forced out of the position for her republicanism — there will be a vacancy for the post of laureate and perhaps King William and Queen Kate will have a say in who is appointed. In consideration of which a humble offering:

So Carol Ann Duffy disdains to write
A verse or two to Prince William and Kate?
Versifiers tend to exaggerate
Their importance and clout. O cursed spite

That mere hacks were born to put this right.
And our advice to happy Kate and Wills
Is leave the poets to their daffodils
Your engagement is headline news despite

The begrudging of words by one who’s paid
To fashion odes and epithalamia
To mark occasions, spread a bit of cheer
(Some of us thought she never made the grade).

So all the best and let the church bells ring
(We know the holiday’s in early spring!)