Seabird City

To hit off a few readable verses on occasions calling for patriotic tears or laughter has been the job of Britain's Poets Laureate ever since Dryden in 1670 was given that official title by Charles II, with a salary of -L-300, a butt of Canary wine. Though the emolument has varied with the years (Tennyson's pay was cut by three-quarters) most royal rhymesters have risen to the occasion. Outstanding exception was Wordsworth, who never produced a line to order because the spirit never moved him at the right moment. One of the conscientious was Lord Tennyson who, according to Carlyle, sat "on a dungheap amid innumerable dead dogs" (i.e., buried himself in Homer and Virgil) during the early years of his laureateship, but later rallied sufficiently to produce such gems as The Charge of the Light Brigade.

The present laureate, John Masefield, sang so feebly on the occasion of George V's death that he afterwards felt it expedient to declare that he disapproved of churning out verse like a machine. Last week, however, he poised himself for another burst, published his Coronation Sonnet which, despite a feminine rhyme in the last line, is as good an official poem as Britons expect:

You stand upon the highway of the sea,

Wherein the ships, your children,

come and go

In splendor at the full of every flow,

Bound to and from whatever ports may

be.

Through this beginning reign, for years

to come,

May fortune set your lot in happy

times:

Your seaman saint still marking, with

his chimes

Daily, some ship of yours returning

home.

Though you are changed from what I

once beheld:

Though your remembered hulls are

with the coral:

I can not think upon your might unstirred.

O sacred city of the lost seabird,

May wealth, out ransoming the ports of

eld,

Be yours, with spiritual gold and holy

laurel.

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