My John Dover Wilson, 1963
The pleasure of my company being
requested, I stand at attention, shake hands,
feeling (fresh out of Auckland)
ill at ease in Edinburgh,
and stoop to fumbling talk with scholarship's
venerable Shakespearean, John
Dover Wilson. 'Your research?' he asks.
'Auden', I say. 'But he's alive! and is
he any good? You know, for me, poetry
still hasn't recovered from the death
of young Rupert Brooke.' My moment passes,
I am dumb; telling others afterwards,
I tend to stumble, saying Keats instead
of Brooke. To be English and inwardly
assured of all that continuity!
From some unlettered countryman's lips
(he liked to say) some phrase of Hamlet's might
still be heard, pithy, wise, and English.
So poets draw on the folk's rich word-hoard.
'You rough-hew them, Oi'll shape the ends.'
That's what Wilson on a country walk had heard.
Auden and I, what did we have but reading?
Max Richards
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