Milordo Inglese

Within a green enclosure
Pricked by cypresses, and full of neat Protestant graves,
One well-cut headstone now proclaims:
“Here lies Lord Richard Vermont,
Who died in his seventy-eighth year.”
It should read:
“Who died early in his own lifetime
But was buried in his seventy-eighth year.”

Never
Until I first went to Italy
Had I seen that elegant, proud expatriate, Lord Richard;
He dressed in the tubular tailoring of his epoch,
Each arm and leg a pipe.
In essence, he was Don Quixote,
But taller, and of the period after the knight had become entangled with his windmill,
So that the sails were now the two white ends of his mustache,
And his head was held aloft by the stiff white pipe of a collar.
Rare bird though he was,
He yet offered a thousand reflections of his era.

In his youth, he had been one of the superb young dandy aristocrats
Collected and trained by Disraeli,
Destined by him to be a modern paladin of politics.
At moments he seemed a poorer Ludwig the Second of Bavaria,
But a prince who served also as his own very inferior Wagner,
Composing palely passionate drawing-room ditties
That in the seventies and eighties used to be warbled after dinner.

But then something had occurred; some nebulous but familiar scandal
Had lightly blown Lord Richard over the Channel,
Which he never crossed again.
Thus at the age of twenty-seven
A promising career was over,
And the thirty or forty years that had elapsed
Had been spent in killing time —or so Lord Richard thought,
Though in reality, killing time
Is only the name for another of the multifarious ways
By which time kills us.