The poetic power of 'The Recalcitrant Cow'

To write anything but one's name and the date of one's visit in a visitors' book is in very bad taste

It goes without saying that over dinner last night we discussed the exciting news headlined "Royal Scoop - Exclusive" that the Queen has written a poem. It was discovered in the visitors' book at the Castle of Mey, the Scottish home of her late mother, and was written after a brief visit by the sovereign while staying at nearby Balmoral in the summer of 1987. Although we are reliably informed that Her Majesty composed the 16-line ode, made up of four quatrains with innovative scanning, it was actually written down by a lady-in-waiting and contains a spelling mistake - splendor for splendour. Here it is:

Although we must leave you/Fair Castle of Mey/we shall never forget/nor could ever repay.

A meal of such splendor/repast of such zest/it will take us till Sunday/just to digest.

To leafy Balmoral/we are now on our way/but our hearts will remain/at the Castle of Mey.

With your gardens and ranges/ and all your good cheer/we will be back again soon/so roll on next year.

Having dealt, it must be said, fairly swiftly with the aesthetic and compositional merits of the verse, the discussion turned to wider issues, namely the proper use of visitors' books, the teaching of poetry and the status of monarchy. One of the guests from Derbyshire, whose family, he claimed, was far older than the Queen's - going back as it does not merely to the Conquest but to the heptarchy of King Alfred - said languidly that to write anything but one's name and the date of one's visit in a visitors book was in very bad taste. Indeed, almost as bad as having one's lavatory paper in one of those roller dispensers attached to the wall. Good heavens, I said, where do you keep your lavatory paper then? On a small table, replied the heptarch, alongside a bowl of flowers, the current issue of Country Life and a few simple but fascinating artefacts such as St Cuthbert's belt buckle or the Sevres china egg cup used by Princess Charlotte as a child.

Our lavatory paper, thank heavens, is either on the floor or on the window sill, its holder having long since lost its screws and fallen off the wall. There isn't room for a table. I was about to ask Ethelbane of Derby whether a carrier bag on the back of the door full of old magazines and curios would do instead, but he was too busy talking about the visits he used to make 30 years ago to a place not unlike the Castle of Mey. How the Duke, his host, would pour scorn on comments in the visitors' book, usually from American guests, which said: "Best place we've stayed in since the Taj Palace", or: "Gee, if only we had gracious homes like this in New Jersey."

I wonder what the Duke would have made of the Queen's entry. I can remember only two visitors' book comments. The first was in a chateaux turned country house hotel near Rheims which said: "This visit has been an interlude of peculiar splendour such as is offered to us only once or twice in a lifetime," signed Dennis and Joyce Baldwin, The Firs, Bagshot, Surrey. The second was in a dark draughty ramshackle hotel in Invernessshire where someone had written simply: "Quoth the raven." Remember Poe's poem?

Great-Uncle Robin would, he could recite more than 100 poems, and I mean long poems such as Endymion and The Faerie Queene. He used to take three-hour walks every day and come back with a whole book of Paradise Lost committed to memory. Being able to recite poems by heart is good for your soul, he used to say, which made me wonder what he would have been like without Milton and Manley Hopkins, because he had the blackest soul I know.

"So you're all here to read English Literature, are you," said Professor French on our first day at Trinity College, Dublin. "You must like poetry - let's hear you recite some." And one by one we had to stand up and declaim. "But I can't remember poetry," wailed Gloria Bolingbroke-Kent. "Oh, come on, I'm sure you must know one," said Professor French. And she did. It's called "The Recalcitrant Cow":

In Huddersfield in Huddersfield

There was a cow that wouldn't yield

The reason that she wouldn't yield

She didn't like her udders feeled.

"Thank you, Miss Bolingbroke-Kent," said Professor French. "I can never remember if that is Donne or Herbert."

Maybe we'd better leave the state of the monarch for another day.