Classic Poem

Drab drugget paths protect these polished floors
From tourist-soled attrition. Guide-book phrases
Co-ordinate fatigued and baffled brains
With mute ex-regal affluence. Simpering faces
Exposed in state-saloons and corridors
Survive the modes of soporific reigns.

A baton, and a battle (was it Blenheim?)
Respectfully remote; the steed curvetting
Beneath his flushed Elector: what's the betting
He failed? . . . No gouty poet lives to pen him
Campaign-concluding odes. Mark, too, the mien
(Obese in ermine, sceptred and serene),
Of goggling Max Augustus! Where's the Court
That equerried his jinks down aisles of green
To chevy stags in sycophantic sport?

Nevertheless, while strolling past such glories
(Van Dyck to Winterhalter; stiff brocade
And powder, to frock-coats and whiskered smiles),
My spirit shares with monarchismal Tories
The fairy-tale of Flunkeydom, displayed
In feudal relicry of centuried styles.
My sympathy for Soviets notwithstanding —
(Dare one deplore the dullness of Democracy?)
I am touched, I am enticed, by super-lavish
Expense; half-cultured coxcomb Kings commanding
In palacefuls the trappings of Autocracy,
With all their country's coffers ripe to ravish.

Outside, sham Renaissance facades evade
Modernity; a melancholic air
Half-masks them, while the sun-warmed windows stare
Affronted on the purposeless parade
Of pygmy visitors. In postures glum,
Like exiled Counts the statues mope aloof.
No vultured banner flaps above the roof:
And loyal gardens, drowsing in the hum
And slant of lapsing afternoon, seem sad.
Fountains upheave pale plumes against the sky,
Murmuring, " Their Majesties came sauntering by —
Was it but yesterday? " . . . Proud fountains sigh
Toward the long glades in golden foliage clad,
" Kurfürsts could do no wrong " . . . And the woods reply,
" Take them for what they were, they weren't so bad!"