Crisis looms ...

... Nick Hornby on the search for a poet laureate: The newspapers... (Hat tip, Maxine Clarke.)

What this seems to demonstrate is that there's no one around like Auden, who could have tossed off the demands for occasional verse with great aplomb. On the other, there is myself. I did, in The Inquirer, note in verse the marriage of Charles and Camilla:

Royal Couplets

Of marriage, matron, prince, and bard I sing
And of delays the fates seem bent to sling
Into the way of true love’s unsmooth course.
Who wouldn’t swap his kingdom for a horse
When called upon to first acknowledge sin
To gain the church’s pardon, just to win
A Town Hall wedding scheduled on the day
That Papal obsequies get in the way?
And now, the charge to praise love’s true devotion
Has England’s Laureate in a commotion.
The scribe dear late Diana’s charms inspired
Has found his rhyming Muse is sick, and tired.
What’s to be done, but take our pen in hand,
Declaring even messy love is grand?
All vain and pompous circumstance aside,
It’s just another hopeful groom and bride.
Therefore we wish poor Charles and his Camilla
Full wedded bliss, down to the last scintilla.