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POETS' CORNER

ROM Chaucer to Tennyson! Between those two names, separated by five hundred years, lies the splendid story of English literature as it is summed up in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. What a shrine for the devout literary pilgrim! Here he may stand beside the dust of that poet who ushered in the dawn of English literature, and while he does so his feet are above the grave of him who was its latter-day glory.

Between these two, what suns and stars have swum into the firmament of English verse and prose! Not all have had their setting in this proud minster; the greatest of the band sleeps beside his own Avon, and others of the mighty dead are scattered here and there not only over the fair face of that land whose inner life they interpreted but also in the soil of the great Republic of the West. Here, however, are laid to rest, or have memorial, the chief of those who have raised the stately fane of English

literature; here, carved in stone, are the names of those who have left their impress most deeply upon the English-speaking race.

Those who laid Chaucer in his grave in this south transept of the Abbey were the true though unconscious founders of the Poets' Corner. They buried wiser than they knew. Standing, as he does, the earliest commanding figure in English literature, how seemly it was that Chaucer should be the first to consecrate this part of the national Valhalla as the resting place of the poets.

Yet it appears to have been merely an accident which led to the burial within these walls of him who told the Canterbury Tales. In other words, it was not because he was a poet that Chaucer found his resting place beside the dust of kings, but because, for a brief season, he was one of the officials of the Abbey. Although he had enjoyed the favour of three Kings, although John of Gaunt had been his constant patron, although he had been entrusted with several important diplomatic missions, Chaucer's old age was overshadowed by poverty. It was at that period of his life that he held for a short time the office of clerk of the works at Westminster, and it is to that fact, and also to his having

breathed his last in an old house in the monastery garden, that his interment within the Abbey is to be attributed. The men of those times could not have been fully conscious of the greatness of him who had passed away. For a century and a half Chaucer's only memorial was a rude slab of lead inscribed with his name; it was not until 1555 that Nicholas Brigham, a brother of the muse, caused the present tomb and canopy to be placed over that honoured dust. Some three hundred years later, that is in 1868, Dr. Rogers had the window above the monument filled with stained glass representing scenes from the poet's life and works. So through long generations does Chaucer evoke the heart-love of his country

men.

"In the poetical quarter," wrote Addison in his famous essay on the Abbey, "I found that there were poets who had no monuments, and monuments which had no poets." Shakespeare is an example of the last statement; Beaumont of the first for he lies under a nameless stone. But from Shakespeare's time onwards, monument or no monument, it came to be recognized that in this south transept was the fitting sepulchre of the nation's chief singers, and if circumstances did not always allow of their

actual burial here, it was still possible to record their fame by storied urn or sculptured bust. And so we have the glorious Poets' Corner of to-day. It is true there are some names missing from the scroll of fame kept within this narrow space, and the absence of several of those names may give the pilgrim pause. There is Pope, for example - why has he no memorial here ? Because he desired none. It was his wish to be buried by the side of his mother in Twickenham Church, and his epitaph in that building, written by himself, records that it is "For one that would not be buried in Westminster Abbey." But the absentees are not numerous, and he who is well read in all the verse suggested by the names on these walls is to be envied his knowledge of English poetry.

As in the case of Chaucer, the accident that death overtook Spenser in the vicinity of the Abbey rather than in his Irish home was no doubt the chief cause why the author of "The Faerie Queene was laid to rest close beside the chronicler of " The Canterbury Tales." Spenser had come to London as the bearer of an official dispatch from Ireland, and made his headquarters at a tavern in King Street, Westminster, the inns of which were the usual resort of messen