Winthrop Mackforth Praed, once nicknamed "the Bard of the Ball-room," was a prolific and versatile poet. However, it's the light, or occasional, verses – those mostly collected under the heading, "Poems of Life and Manners" – that fully display his originality.
Praed had been educated at Eton and Cambridge, and began his career as a lawyer. From his later vantage-point (privileged in both senses) as a Tory MP, he wrote poetry that displayed some astute and remarkably even-handed political swordsmanship. The astringent, affectionate satires on the beau monde, for which he's best known, are informed by a humane common sense not unlike that of Jane Austen. As we ponder the developments 2011 may bring, this week's poem, "Twenty-Eight and Twenty-Nine", may offer a reassuring perspective.
Praed is concerned, of course, with 1828 and '29. Many of his allusions are specific to the time: that's the beauty of occasional verse, but, when it comes to staying-power, one of its disadvantages. It's helpful to know Who was Who and What was What – for instance, that Robert Peel was home secretary and that the Catholic Association, founded by Daniel O'Connell, Richard Lalor Shiel and Thomas Wyse, ran the ultimately successful campaign for Catholic Emancipation.
For more arcane references, footnotes can only add to the pungency of the humour and the social commentary. You don't need to know all the details of "The Red Barn Murder" to deduce that "poor Corder" had been accused of homicide, found guilty on inconclusive evidence, and hanged. But you'd need to be something of a social historian to know that "Warren was a manufacturer of boot-blacking and the inventor of that system of advertising which consists of defacing other people's walls." There's more background information here, besides the further two stanzas my version omits.
As in many of Praed's poems, much remains in "Twenty-Eight and Twenty-Nine" to appeal to the modern reader. We might be inspired to draw topical parallels (the short-lived celebrity marriages, the columns of trite commentary) or to insert "grand and great" names of our own. Certainly it's tempting to feel that the habits and paradoxes of power have not essentially changed in the last 200-plus years. Stanza three, for instance, has a quatrain that seems tragically applicable to the 20th century and beyond: "Some suffering land will rend in twain/The manacles that bound her,/And gather the links of the broken chain/ To fasten them proudly round her…"
Generally, though, Praed's stanzas strike a lighter note, or seem to, thanks to their spritely elegance. You expect the Ballroom Bard to get out of breath and sweaty: he never does. His technique seems effortless. The rhymes may be innovative or conventional but are never less than natural. Sometimes, internal rhyming adds piquancy. Praed is always in his element when he has a good refrain, and he teases this one through an array of minute and telling variations.
The final "twist" is perhaps the most surprising. Those last two lines gallantly, if sentimentally, turn the poem into a tribute – presumably to Praed's wife, Helen Bogle. The satirist throws down his sword, and holds out an uxorious bouquet. Well, why not – it's the new year.
While no doubt 2011 will prove to be "the year of consequences" predicted by Ed Milliband, we can, I think, be confident that the merry infant (the new year, I mean) will still manage to deliver a certain amount of same old same-old, some of which would surely have provoked our genial mocker-of-the 19th-century-week to eloquence. There are plenty of rhymes for "coalition," after all. What a pity that, today, the Ballroom Bard is so little read. He can certainly teach the junior-league performance-poets a thing or two about timing and rhyming.
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Twenty-Eight and Twenty-Nine
"Rien n'est changé, mes amis" – Charles X
I heard a sick man's dying sigh,
And an infant's idle laughter;
The Old Year went with mourning by,
The New came dancing after.
Let Sorrow shed her lonely tear,
Let Revelry hold her ladle!
Bring boughs of cypress for the bier,
Fling roses on the cradle:
Mutes to wait on the funeral state!
Pages to pour the wine!
A requiem for Twenty-eight,
And a health to Twenty-nine!
Alas for human happiness!
Alas for human sorrow!
Our yesterday is nothingness, -
What else will be our morrow?
Still Beauty must be stealing hearts,
And Knavery stealing purses,
Still cooks must live by making tarts,
And wits by making verses:
While sages prate, and courts debate,
The same stars set and shine;
And the world, as it rolled through Twenty-eight,
Must roll through Twenty-nine.
Some King will come, in Heaven's good time,
To the tomb his father came to;
Some thief will wade through blood and crime
To a crown he has no claim to;
Some suffering land will rend in twain
The manacles that bound her,
And gather the links of the broken chain
To fasten them proudly round her;
The grand and great will love and hate,
And combat, and combine;
And much where we were in Twenty-eight
We shall be in Twenty-nine.
O'Connell will fail to raise the rent,
And Kenyon to sink the nation,
And Shiel will abuse the Parliament
And Peel the Association;
And the thought of bayonets and swords
Will make ex-chancellors merry,
And jokes will be cut in the House of Lords,
And throats in the county Kerry;
And writers of weight will speculate
On the Cabinet's design,
And just what it did in Twenty-eight
It will do in Twenty-nine.
Mathews will be extremely gay,
And Hook extremely dirty:
And brick and mortar still will say,
"Try Warren, No. 80."
And "General Sauce" will have its puff,
And so will General Jackson;
And peasants will drink heavy stuff,
Which they put a heavy tax on:
And long and late, at many a fête,
Gooseberry champagne will shine;
And as old as it was in Twenty-eight,
It will be in Twenty-nine.
John Thomas Mugg, on a lonely hill,
Will do a deed of mystery;
The Morning Chronicle will fill
Five columns with the history;
The jury will be all surprise,
The prisoner quite collected,
And Justice Park will wipe his eyes
And be very much affected;
And folks will relate poor Corder's fate
As they hurry home to dine,
Comparing the hangings of Tweny-eight
With the hangings of Twenty-nine.
And the goddess of love will keep her smiles,
And the god of cups his orgies,
And there will be riots in St. Giles,
And weddings in St George's.
And mendicants will sup like kings,
And lords will swear like lackeys,
And black eyes oft will lead to rings
And rings will lead to black eyes;
And pretty Kate will scold her mate
In a dialect all divine;
Alas! They married in Twenty-eight, -
They will part in Twenty-nine!
And oh! I shall find how, day by day,
All thoughts and things look older;
How the laugh of pleasure grows less gay,
And the heart of friendship colder;
But still I shall be what I have been,
Sworn foe to Lady Reason,
And seldom troubled with the spleen,
And fond of talking treason:
I shall buckle my skate, and leap my gate,
And throw – and write – my line;
And the woman I worshipped in Twenty-eight
I shall worship in Twenty-nine!
WINTHROP MACKFORTH PRAED