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Remembering Ford Madox Ford and Parade's End
For Sondra Stang
Beginning with two young men before The War,
Young men 'of the English public official class'
'In the perfectly appointed railway carriage'-
Lord Russell would say, a couple of worlds away
As usual, that he pitied his children
Because nobody born since Nineteen-Twelve
Could have known a moment's happiness; nobody,
He should have said, of the middle class and up,
Like your two young men, Macmaster starting out
On the social and sexual climb and Tietjens
The yeoman at statistics and sufferings-
Beginning your four gospels about a world
Threatened by nothing more than suffragettes,
As outward and as there as it had been
For Jane and George but showing its omens forth
In clerical madness, fog, and a fatal smash
Between the automobile and the horse;
Progressing as it had to do into mud and death
With but one memory of Bemerton's parish priest:-
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridall of the earth and skie-
And back to London in hysterical victory,
The adjutant's cry across the square: "There will be
No more parades;" and thence to England's remains,
The winding down in one poor dying mind
Not even the hero's, the great house sold away
And the great tree cut down-dear God, dear Ford,
It's like that earlier English myth of how
Before the Tudors it was all roast beef
And wassail ale and the Yule log and the boar's head
In hand bear I; yet we, who did the next
Big one entailed upon us at Versailles,
Read you and believe your word. They were,
As we are, a sorry lot; you made them good.