Tony Harrison(b. 1937)
Classics Society
(Leeds Grammar School 1552—1952) 9
The grace of Tullies eloquence doth excell
any Englishmans tongue . . . my barbarous stile . . . 1
The tongue our leaders use to cast their spell
was once denounced as "rude, "gross, "base and "vile.
How fortunate we are who've come so far!
We boys can take old Hansards2 and translate
the British Empire into SPQR3
but nothing demotic 0 or too up-to-date,slangy
and not the English that I speak at home,
not Hansard standards, and if Antoninus 4
spoke like delinquent Latin back in Rome
he'd probably get gamma double minus.5
And so the lad who gets the alphas works
the hardest in his class at his translation
and finds good Ciceronian for Burke's:
a dreadful schism in the Britishnation.6