My father, however, who never contrived to rid himself of the prejudices instilled into him in childhood, went on believing in his Wordsworthian formulas till the end. Yes, he too, I am afraid, would have preferred the precocious larks to my maturer lucubrations. And yet, how competently I have learned to write! In mere justice to myself I must insist on it. Not, of course, that it matters in the least. The larks might be my masterpiece; it would not matter a pin. Still, I insist. I insist.... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER V “Quite the little poet”—how bitterly poor Keats resented the remark. Perhaps because he secretly knew that it was just. For Keats, after all, was that strange, unhappy chimaera—a little artist and a large man. Between the writer of the Odes and the writer of the letters there is all the gulf that separates a halma player from a hero. Personally, I do not go in for heroic letters. I only modestly lay claim to being a competent second-class halma player—but a good deal more competent, I insist (though of course it doesn’t matter), than when I wrote about the larks. “Quite the little poet”—always and, alas, incorrigibly I am that. Let me offer you a specimen of my matured competence. I select it at random, as the reviewers say, from my long-projected and never-to-be-concluded series of poems on the first six Caesars. My father, I flatter myself, would have liked the title. That, at any rate, is thoroughly Wordsworthian; it is in the great tradition of that immortal “Needle Case in the form of a Harp.” “Caligula crossing the bridge of boats between Baiae and Puteoli. By Peter Paul Rubens (b. 1577: d. 1640).” The poem itself, however, is not very reminiscent of the Lake District. Prow after prow the floating ships Bridge the blue gulph; the road is laid. Caesar on a piebald horse Prances with all his cavalcade. Drunk with their own quick blood they go. The waves flash as with seeing eyes; The tumbling cliffs mimic their speed, And they have filled the vacant skies With waltzing Gods and Virtues, set The Sea Winds singing with their shout, Made Vesta’s temple on the headland Spin like a twinkling roundabout. The twined caduceus in his hand, And having golden wings for spurs, Young Caesar dressed as God looks on And cheers his jolly mariners; Cheers as they heave from off the bridge The trippers from the seaside town; Laughs as they bang the bobbing heads And shove them bubbling down to drown.