I'm swept in by the crowds and wash up here,
by Betjeman's bronze bonce, a fitting start.
This furnish'd, burnish'd head, this rumpled ear,
bring back those childhood poems learned by heart,
their rhythmic rhymes applied a smooth veneer
to all the fierce, lost lives his verses chart.
I wonder if this gallery displays
more poets on whose portraits I might gaze.
Yes. Milton, serving as he stands and waits,
two years before he lost the power of sight,
and poor John Clare whose writing resonates
with joy and wonder, he found clear delight
in nature, which his young work celebrates;
asylum-lodged, he salvaged wit to write.
Romantic voices call me: Shelley, Keats.
I move along for more poetic treats.
Lord Byron swaggers, even as he sits,
one doubts that he'll a-roving go no more,
while Wordsworth, lonely as a cloud, unknits
his noble brow for portrait number four,
and, hanging nearby, Coleridge, as befits
his Lyrical Ballads co-conspirator.
Replete with notions natural and sublime,
I chance upon ten fingers fixed in time.
The time was eighteen fifty-three, two hands
that clasped in love, in Rome, were plaster-cast.
The Brownings wed and fled to foreign lands,
and now bright bronze has made that handshake last.
Their touch, their tale, their poetry still stands,
her subtle sonnets rich and unsurpassed.
I frolic on through lives and years, to spot
an Englishman, an Irishman, a Scot.
Between the wars this poet Anglicised;
a portrait, profile and full-face combined,
shows T S, Wasteland passed through, pluralised.
The Irishman is Joyce, who, unconfined
by literary mores was demonised,
but fit young Robbie Burns looks calm and kind.
These poets mix and mingle in my head,
but all the ones I've looked upon are dead.
The living poets at the NPG
may not be on display, but in reserve.
Blake Morrison and Wendy Cope are free
to view online: a little time and nerve
may unearth many more. This gallery
pays poets due attention, and with verve.
A portrait can’t lay bare a poet’s mind,
but life and verse are surely intertwined.