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!
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