If you are Andrew Motion, Britain's poet laureate and the man charged with producing a cheerful commemorative poem about Prince Charles's impending marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles, none of the obvious rhymes - vanilla, flotilla, Godzilla - seem appropriate, somehow.
Nor would you want to dwell on the pre-wedding mishaps that have filled Britons with such unbecoming Schadenfreude in recent days: the panicked confusion over the time and place of the ceremony; the fact that the groom's parents will not attend; the lingering specter of Charles's dead ex-wife, looming like Banquo at the feast.
But although this royal occasion might seem trickier than most to immortalize, all present their own particular problems, said Robert Potts, an editor at The Times Literary Supplement who until recently was editor of Poetry Review magazine.
"Every single time, it's an impossible job," Mr. Potts said of poems celebrating royal weddings. "One's not entirely clear why anyone bothers to do it."
...
It was even worse in the old days. Poets laureate have produced some shockingly poor work in their time, as in the case of the Edwardian laureate Alfred Austin, who, when the Prince of Wales fell ill, is said to have produced the following: "Across the wires the electric message came/ 'He is no better, he is much the same.' "
But even Austin was not ridiculed as relentlessly as Colley Cibber, who flattered and social-climbed his way into the laureateship in 1730. Alexander Pope immortalized him in a later version of his epic poem "The Dunciad," making him the King of Dunces, and an anonymous contemporary wrote, meanly:
In merry old England it once was a rule,
The King had his Poet, and also his Fool:
But now we're so frugal, I'd have you to know it,
That Cibber can serve both for Fool and for Poet. [thanks to Sharon]
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