Poetry celebrating the life of QUEEN ELIZABETH II: From poets around the world (THE POET's international anthologies)

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The Queen has returned to Westminster Abbey for a ceremony to mark the 60th anniversary of her coronation in 1953. She was joined by the Duke of Edinburgh, who looked well despite health problems yesterday, Charles and Camilla, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and her other children and grandchildren. Goblin Market and Other Poems was the first collection of her poetry to be published, and it was the book that brought her to public attention. She went on to influence a range of later poets, including Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ford Madox Ford, and Elizabeth Jennings. Philip Larkin was an admirer, praising her ‘steely stoicism’. The words to this hymn were originally written in Latin at some point in the 6th or 7th Century. They were translated and put to music in 1843 by J M Neale. The melody for the hymn was borrowed from the Alleluyas in Henry Purcell's 'O God, Thou art my God' For me, these qualities are so important. They reflect respect and care for our fellow humans. They do not provide a ‘return on investment,’ they exist because we are human and they are there to help us navigate the challenges of life. They remind us that ‘this too shall pass’ and that we can always ‘carry on.’ With love, Sue Ellson🙂

The technical accomplishment, and use of that conceit, cannot disguise that the poem is an uncritical acceptance of how the queen was represented. Armitage calls his lily/poem “a token of thanks.” How news of the death of Elizabeth I in the 17th century was communicated in ballads and proclamations After meeting her when she was just three-years-old, Winston Churchill wrote: “Princess Elizabeth has an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant.”

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Of the lethal doctrinal disputes that plagued the 16th century, she said: “There is Jesus Christ; the rest is a dispute over trifles.” She loathed the concepts of thought crimes and purity tests, saying that she did not want to make “windows on men’s souls.” The ceremony included reminders of the coronation six decades ago: hymns written for the coronation and an anthem commissioned for this service “through the generosity of” many who sang as choristers in 1953. During the Queen's coronation she was anointed with oil, and a flask containing the liquid was carried through the abbey today and placed on the altar by the Dean of Westminster. But the conformism of Armitage’s royal poems strips away their artistic merit. His first royal poem followed Prince Philip’s death. “ The Patriarchs – An Elegy” portrayed a noble self-sacrifice alongside his spouse: We are grieving now because our departed Queen was so loved, perhaps more than any of her predecessors. In our age of rumbustious democracy, where deference has evaporated, the outpouring of sadness has been extraordinary and is a shining tribute to her character.

The humour had certainly run out. His poem for Princess Anne’s wedding to Mark Phillips in 1973 runs to a perfunctory dozen lines that end: Queen Elizabeth was not only the longest-serving monarch in British history but could even be regarded as the finest.

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The crown is so heavy — weighing in at 2.2kg of solid gold — that it was worn only briefly by the Queen during the coronation service, being swapped for the lighter Imperial State Crown - the more familiar crown which the Queen wears habitually to state openings of parliament. Sixty years ago, it was placed on her head by the then Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Geoffrey Fisher. “By a glance she indicated it was steady,” he later recalled. The Abbey doors are opened and guests begin to take their seats. #60yearsagotoday #coronation60th June 2, 2013 Westminster Abbey (@wabbey) The problem is not Armitage’s talents, but the dead weight of the institutions he has embraced. The former Laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s poem on the queen’s death, “ Daughter,” failed miserably for the same reasons, It is so bad that it makes Armitage’s effort look good by comparison—at times barely intelligible, fawning, with dreadful lines like, “Soon enough they would come to know this had long been the Age of Grief; / that History was ahead of them.”