Picking up on Alison's mention of _The Infant and the Pearl_, I did a web
search and discovered what Douglas Clark would probably have posted had he
not been off visiting his Scottish cousins: Doug Oliver's own commentary on
the poem in the _Long Poem Group Newsletter_ #5
(http://www.bath.ac.uk/~exxdgdc/1pgn/1pgn52.html). It would be wonderful if
someone (Alison?) could post an excerpt from the poem, about which Doug
speaks so instructively, on so many levels of life and literature, here:

My anti-Thatcher poem, _The Infant and the Pearl_ (1979-83), attacks
monetarism's harsh social effects while lamenting socialism's inability to
control financial liquidity or to create economic energy. (These are, of
course, the problems Mr Blair now wrestles with.)

Form and title went together. 'Infant' here means a Down's Syndrome child as
symbol for all the socially disadvantaged. John Hall had been reminded by my
first novel of the medieval _Pearl_ poem because of the role a child plays
in it (my late mentally-handicapped son, Tom). That struck a chord because
just before my daughter Kate was born on a snowy January night in Cambridge,
our front door was flung open and an immense midwife announced: "I'm Pearl."
'Margaret' of Margaret Thatcher is Greek for pearl.

The 14th century _Pearl_ has a more com0plex metrics than, perhaps, any
other English poem. Its 101 12-line stanzas (100 for perfection, one for
unity), are each rhymed as closely as an Italian sonnet. Their first lines
contain a key word, their last line is a refrain, and these change at
five-stanza intervals. The four-stress lines all alliterate up to four
times. The form and title linked my life-experience to a prosody capable of
accommodating many different tones.