Dully Gumption's Addendum

At his begetting a Welsh adder

Declaiming in Ayrshire against Divine Kings

With the jewel of Ireland under its skullbone

Entered his mother and for nine months

What other prodigies?

The ghost confronted her in doorways.

She suckled him in an unlit crevice of country

Where words grew out of the ground freakishly

With something of a Neanderthal slouch.

Is this the birth of Caedmon?

England in that day lay under the head of the dead god king

Cromwell cut from the country body but could not bury or

silence;

It moved with a kind of maggot.

These maggots were all words stuffed with dead godly kingliness.

In the merry head of England?

The maggots multiplied, spilling into the shires.

Each maggot wore a crown like a basilisk

And the bumpkin English took them for the words of god-sent

law.

So these maggots bit deep into the brains of the bumpkin English.

An eleventh plague? O Egypt!

Englishman after Englishman fell eaten to a mummy skin

Around a man-weight maggot and stiffened

To a chrysalis from which a black fly in no time

Flew up into the rotten face of the kingdom.

Where's the Moses for it?

At Grammar School this remorseless strain of maggot

Behind greying disciplinarian masks

Of Addison of Gladstone and of Arnold

Ate into his brain, ate into his brain.

He was a tractable booby!

They took up house in there, they pronounced for him,

They peered from the gnawn-out eye sockets, they budged him

Southwards, southwards, Oxford, Cambridge,

And his body bundled behind like a lopped earthworm's.

All this done with smiles?

The colleges bent over him and night after night thereafter

He dreamed the morphine of his Anglicising:

Dreamed his tongue uprooted, dreamed his body drawn and

quartered

High over England and saw Thames go crawling from the frag-

ments-

Tell it all, tell it all!

And fell and lay, his own gravestone, which went on all night

Carving itself in lordly and imperturbable English.

So he woke numbed. So came of age, like a cheese,

Mouldering to England's expectations.

Would God he had been born African!

Now this chrysalis twitches into his thirties,

The fly hardening in him that will soon one sunrise

Pop eyes into the open and go up

From the husk of his mother earth with a cloud

Like Elijah?

Of loyal Trafalgar black starlings

And the morning flocks blackening the nostrils

Mouth and eyes of London where it

Leans so low over England.