I recently returned from a trip to London, where I paid a visit, as I am wont to do, to the Poets’ Corner in the South Transept of Westminster Abbey. To me that is hallowed ground, and if you don’t mind, I thought I might share some observations with you.
It all started in the year 1400 when Geoffrey Chaucer, writer of “The Canterbury Tales” and father of English poetry, was buried in the Abbey. Interestingly, he was honored not because of his prowess as a poet, but because he was the Clerk of Works for the Abbey and part-time diplomat for the government. Thereafter when Edmund Spenser, writer of “The Faerie Queene,” asked to be buried near Chaucer, the Poets’ Corner was well and truly founded. Today more than 100 writers are memorialized with statues and floor plates or are actually buried there, and those interred include Dryden, Tennyson, Browning, Hardy and Kipling.
Pride of place, as you might expect, goes to William Shakespeare, who has the most prominent statue in the Corner. Oddly, he is not given an heroic pose but rather a quite nonchalant posture, as if this is all much ado about nothing.
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But then, English eccentricity goes back a ways. Consider the case of Ben Jonson, Elizabethan poet and playwright and friend of Shakespeare. He was eligible for burial in Westminster Abbey but did not have the money for a first-class tomb. He could only afford a space 18 inches by 18 inches. So he was buried upright!
Here is one of his best-known poems:
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I’ll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honouring thee
As giving it a hope, that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon didst only breathe,
And sent’st it back to me;
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
Not of itself, but thee.
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Buried just in front of Shakespeare’s statue is Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), one of the most important literary figures in 18th century England. He was a poet and essayist but is best known for compiling an extraordinary dictionary with 40,000 words defined in detail and 114,000 quotations. Leafing through, I was pleased to learn that “antiferous” means “producing ducks.” I always wondered. Sometimes, however, looking up one word in his Dictionary requires looking up several others. One would think that “cough” is easy to define. Dr. Johnson says that it means “a convulsion of the lungs vellicated by some sharp serosity.” Who knew!
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In the Poet’s Corner, T.S. Eliot and Alfred, Lord Tennyson are memorialized together . . . the leading Victorian poet and the iconic poet of Modernism side by side. When Eliot was at Harvard in the early 1900’s, Tennyson was regarded, not always kindly, as the arch-Victorian. But as Eliot secured his own reputation, he praised Tennyson as having “three qualities that are seldom found together except in the greatest poets: abundance, variety and complete competence.” Eliot had these same qualities in spades:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
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Charles Dickens in a poet’s corner? Well, yes. Amidst his fourteen famous novels he was also writing poems. This somewhat melancholy piece comes from “The Village Coquettes,” an early stage musical for which he wrote the book and lyrics.
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, lie strewn around me here;
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, how sad, how cold, how drear!
How like the hopes of childhood’s day,
Thick clust’ring on the bough!
How like those hopes in their decay —
How faded are they now!
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, lie strewn around me here;
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, how sad, how cold, how drear!
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There are only six women (so far) honored in the Poets’ Corner: all three Brontë sisters, Fanny Burney, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell and Jane Austen. Emily Bronte and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are acknowledged as being among the great poets. But it may surprise some to learn that Jane Austen was an occasional poet as well. Her light-hearted rhythmic writing almost reminds us of a later Gilbert and Sullivan style. She wrote this piece in 1811, just three days before her first novel, Sense and Sensibility was published.
When stretch’d on one’s bed
With a fierce-throbbing head,
Which precludes alike thought or repose,
How little one cares
For the grandest affairs
That may busy the world as it goes!
How little one feels
For the waltzes and reels
Of our Dance-loving friends at a Ball!
How slight one’s concern
To conjecture or learn
What their flounces or hearts may befall.
How little one minds
If a company dines
On the best that the Season affords!
How short is one’s muse
O’er the Sauces and Stews,
Or the Guests, be they Beggars or Lords.
How little the Bells,
Ring they Peels, toll they Knells,
Can attract our attention or Ears!
The Bride may be married,
The Corse may be carried
And touch nor our hopes nor our fears.
Our own bodily pains
Ev’ry faculty chains;
We can feel on no subject besides.
Tis in health and in ease
We the power must seize
For our friends and our souls to provide.
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The most recent poets to be welcomed to the Poets’ Corner are C.S. Lewis in 2013 and Philip Larkin in 2016. Larkin, in my judgment, was one of the great modern poets, and C.S. Lewis is famous for saying: “There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.” I hope he’s right.
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Finally, the award for most handsome statue in the Corner goes to John Dryden, Poet Laureate and one of the leading poets of the 17th century.
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Across from Dryden, just a short distance away, is a bust of the composer George Frederick Handel, who somehow sneaked into the literary surroundings. However, that turns out to be appropriate, for Handel put music to some of Dryden’s finest poetry (See Video) including:
As from the pow’r of sacred lays
The spheres began to move,
And sung the great Creator’s praise
To all the bless’d above;
So when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And music shall untune the sky.
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It should be noted that in 1984 an American Poets’ Corner was established at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in New York. Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Washington Irving were the first to be honored. Two poets who were later inducted are also in the Westminster Abbey Poets’ Corner: T.S. Eliot, an American who became an English citizen, and W.H. Auden, an Englishman who took American citizenship. Seems like a fair trade.
VIDEO. Our video presents four famous sonnets written by esteemed poets from the Poets’ Corner.
Edmund Spenser One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand
Percy Bysshe Shelley Ozymandias
Elizabeth Barrett Browning How Do I Love Thee?
William Shakespeare Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds
As a finale, the orchestra and singers of the Dunedin Consort in Edinburgh present the closing chorus of the Dryden/Handel “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day.” The super-titles were added for French television.
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: MY SPECIAL CORNER OF THE WORLD
