A Ballad of the Investiture 1969

The moon was in the Cambridge sky

    And bathed Great Court in silver light

When Hastings-Bass and Woods and I

    And quiet Elizabeth, tall and white,

With that sure clarity of mind

Which comes to those who’ve truly dined,

    Reluctant rose to say good-night;

And all of us were bathed the while

In the large moon of Harry’s1 smile.

Then, sir, you said what shook me through

    So that my courage almost fails:

“I want a poem out of you

    On my Investiture in Wales.”

Leaving, you slightly raised your hand—

“And that,” you said, “is a command.”

    For years I wondered what to do

And now, at last, I’ve thought it better

To write a kind of rhyming letter.

Spring frocks, silk hats at morning’s prime,

    One of a varied congregation

I glided out, at breakfast time,

    With Euston’s Earl from Euston Station,

Through Willesden’s bleak industrial parts,

Through Watford on to leafy Herts

    Bound for a single destination.

Warwicks and Staffs were soaked in rain;

So was the open Cheshire plain.

The railway crossed the river Dee

    Where Mary called the cattle home,

The wide marsh widened into sea,

    The wide sea whitened into foam.

The green Welsh hills came steeply down

To many a cara-circled town—

    Prestatyn, Rhyl—till here were we,

As mountains rose on either hand,

Awed strangers in a foreign land.

I can’t forget the climbing street

    Below Caernarvon’s castle wall,

The dragon flag, the tramp of feet,

    The gulls’ perturbed, insistent call,

Bow-windowed house-fronts painted new,

Heads craning out to get a view,

    A mounting tension stilling all—

And, once within the castle gate,

The murmuring hush of those who wait.

Wet banners flap. The sea mist clears.

    Colours are backed by silver stone.

Moustached hereditary peers

    Are ranged in rows behind the throne.

With lifted sword the rites begin.

Earl Marshal leads the victims in.

    The Royal Family waits alone.

Now television cameras whirr

Like cats at last induced to purr.

You know those moments that there are

When, lonely under moon and star,

    You wait upon a beach?

Suddenly all Creation’s near

And complicated things are clear,

    Eternity in reach!

So we who watch the action done—

A mother to her kneeling son

    The Crown of office giving—

Can hardly tell, so rapt our gaze

Whether but seconds pass or days

    Or in what age we’re living.

You knelt a boy, you rose a man.

And thus your lonelier life began.