In Lieu of the Laureate
I am so distressed to see that the Poet Laureate has failed to produce an official ode for the British royal wedding that I hardly know whether to rummage through the archives of the Hanoverians for a substitute manufactured for some earlier occasion or to manufacture a new article myself. I think I shall let learning and poetry both serve me with the help of E. K. Broadus’s agreeable new study of “The Laureateship.”
Here, for instance, is a part of what the elegant Henry James Pye, George III’s laureate, wrote when the Princess Charlotta Matilda of England married Prince Frederick William of Stuttgart:
Awhile the frowning Lord of arms
Shall yield to gentler Pow’rs the plain;
Lo! Britain greets the milder charms
Of Cytherea’s reign.
Mute is the trumpet’s brazen throat,
And the sweet flute’s melodious note
Floats on the soft ambrosial gale;
The sportive Loves and Graces round,
Beating with jocund step the ground,
Th’ auspicious nuptials hail!
The Muses cease to weave the wreath of war,
But hang their roseate flow’rs on Hymen’s golden car!
Or if this seems a shade heroic and a little old-fashioned, here are certain lines of Tennyson on the marriage of Princess Beatrice to Prince Henry of Battenberg:
The Mother weeps
At that white funeral of the single life,
Her maiden daughter’s marriage; and her tears
Are half of pleasure, half of pain—the child
Is happy—even in leaving her!
And yet that seems to me to have a touch of insinuation about the fun of getting away from the royal mother which I should be the last to intend—though Tennyson cannot have meant it. Let me turn instead to Thomas Warton and his admirable compliments to a king with the same name as that of the present husband of England’s queen:
Lo! the fam’d isle, which hails thy chosen sway,
What fertile fields her temperate suns display!
Where Property secures the conscious swain,
And guards, while Plenty gives, the golden grain....
These are Britannia’s praises. Feign to trace
With rapt reflections Freedom’s favourite race!
But though the generous isle, in arts and arms
Thus stands supreme, in Nature’s choicest charms;
Though George and Conquest guard her sea-girt throne
One happier blessing still she calls her own—
and that happier blessing was of course the bride.
I find myself coming back to the bride, as one does when mortals are married. Here suddenly the homely muse of one of our republican poets overtakes me:
This George and Mary Windsor must have lots of sense as well as dust, to let their only daughter marry a man who is quite ordinary—a man at least who never had as good a start in life as dad, but is a boy of their own town, grew up there and there settles down. Well, that is how it ought to be, and if he sticks to business he will thrive and prosper till he may stand before kings and queens some day. And what if the new couple have to work and plan and scrimp and save a few years till they make their pile and can put on a better style? If they attempt it nothing loth it will be better for them both. Then hail the bridegroom and the bride! Let the nuptial knot be tied! Whatever others may prefer, her for him and him for her!