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    Full Poem: “The Patriarchs – An Elegy”, UK’s Poet Laureate Tribute to Prince Philip

    Poet Laureate Simon Armitage’s heartwarming poem to mark the passing away of Prince Philip has been released on the day of the duke’s funeral in official social media accounts of the Royal family as a tribute to Duke of Edinburgh.

    Titled ‘The Patriarchs – An Elegy’, the poem is also Armitage’s first to address the UK royals in his time as a poet laureate and said that the obituaries had taught him that the Duke of Edinburgh “hated sycophancy – I didn’t want to write anything that would have sounded sycophantic in his ears”.

    With glimpses of Prince Philip’s extraordinary life as a soldier, husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather, Armitage’s poem opens on a snowy morning. It says, “The weather is a peculiarly British obsession,” said Armitage – and expands into a dedication to the men of Prince Philip’s generation, “great-grandfathers from birth”.

    The Patriarchs – An Elegy

    The weather in the window this morning
    is snow, unseasonal singular flakes,
    a slow winter’s final shiver. On such an occasion
    to presume to eulogise one man is to pipe up
    for a whole generation – that crew whose survival
    was always the stuff of minor miracle,
    who came ashore in orange-crate coracles,
    fought ingenious wars, finagled triumphs at sea
    with flaming decoy boats, and side-stepped torpedoes.

    Husbands to duty, they unrolled their plans
    across billiard tables and vehicle bonnets,
    regrouped at breakfast. What their secrets were
    was everyone’s guess and nobody’s business.
    Great-grandfathers from birth, in time they became
    both inner core and outer case
    in a family heirloom of nesting dolls.
    Like evidence of early man their boot-prints stand
    in the hardened earth of rose-beds and borders.

    They were sons of a zodiac out of sync
    with the solar year, but turned their minds
    to the day’s big science and heavy questions.
    To study their hands at rest was to picture maps
    showing hachured valleys and indigo streams, schemes
    of old campaigns and reconnaissance missions.
    Last of the great avuncular magicians
    they kept their best tricks for the grand finale:
    Disproving Immortality and Disappearing Entirely.

    The major oaks in the wood start tuning up
    and skies to come will deliver their tributes.
    But for now, a cold April’s closing moments
    parachute slowly home, so by mid-afternoon
    snow is recast as seed heads and thistledown.

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