 |
 |
The Golden Treasury (1952) 'Boys, this is a famous book. Treasure it, this treasury. Most of you have never had a po’try book to call your own. Many a family lacks such an anthology. Any po’try at home, Richards?’ I knew my dad had once studied some, and kept, shelved high, the books he’d never opened since. Paradise Lost was one. Were they anthologies? I thought I’d not mention them. 'Sir, my mother has a book called A Child’s Garden of Verses.' 'All by the one writer, lad, so not an anthology. A collection of flowers, see, selected for variety. That book your mother has - all by Stevenson, Robert Louis - (what else did he write, boys? Treasure Island, classic too!) all by one hand - monotonous, no?’ ‘You may be right, sir.’ 'Now, boys, you see the names here?’ - pointing to title page and spine - ‘Palgrave at the top, Macmillan at the bottom. Now here’s your homework, and use the library: next week report back on these two men. And - read the poem by Marlowe and all by Robert Herrick. Then - write a version of your own.’ I did: ‘The Passionate Motor Mechanic to his Love’. I all the rhyming pleasures proved. More then in my apprenticeship than now, they mattered to me, rhyme and metre. Soon I’d compiled - no stopping me - my very own leaden treasury. Palgrave? a civil servant - big deal. Macmillans - London publishers - so what? Poets? always in over-supply. 'Songs and lyrics' weren’t all they wrote. And were all poets dead and British? Yes, and out of copyrght. And why the cover cameo? - the title-page vignette - tootling a flute to his dog and a bird above, pan-pipes propped against a wild flower at his feet, a naked long-haired youth!