Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Yet if His Majesty, our sovereign lord,
Should of his own accord,
Friendly himself invite
And say, “I’ll be your guest tomorrow night,”
How should we stir ourselves, call and command
All hands to work! “let no man idle stand!
Set me fine Spanish tables in the hall;
See they be fitted all;
Let there be room to eat
And order taken  that  there lack no meat.
See ev’ry sconce and candlestick made bright
That of themselves they may give a light.
Look to the Presence: are the carpets spread,
The dazie o’er the head,
The cushions on the chairs
And all the candles lighted on the stairs?
Perfume the chambers, and in any case
Let each man give attendance in his place!”
Thus, if the king were coming, we would do;
And ‘twere good reason too;
For ‘tis a duteous thing
To show all honour to an earthly king
And after all our travail and our cost,
So he be please, to think no labour lost.
But at the coming of the King of Heaven
All’s at six and seven;
We wallow in our sin,
Christ cannot find a chamber at the inn.
We entertain Him always as a stranger,
And, as at first, still lodge him in the manger.

I came across this poem many years ago but it still has an impact, as I found when I looked it up. It starts off in a slightly cack-hand way, “Yet“ which has always puzzled me a bit. However, thinking about it now I realise that this is the continuation of an argument which the poet (Anon) has been having with himself. We have broken into his private thoughts. Although the basic structure is the pentameter (five stresses), the irregularly placed short lines of three stresses reinforce this feeling of discussion and current thought.

The description of getting ready for a big ‘do’ is beautifully done, I think, and must be nearly unique for the period, (it dates from the mid-1500s). The uneven length of line is used here to reinforce the feeling of bustle and the whole lulls us into not worrying about what’s coming next.

The perfectly reasonable second section commenting on the first, “Thus if the king were coming…” carries this idea forward. So far it is a well constructed poem about everyday things. It is only in the last short section (with the introductory warning ‘but’), “But at the coming…” that the whole thing is suddenly kicked into a new, spiritual dimension. This is Seamus Heaney’s ‘little surprise’. How should we, how do we, treat the True King? It’s the same in the sixteenth century at in first. As with all good poems, the questions raised are still valid, still relevant.

 Martin Underwood