Here is an early poem by Ted Hughes. The Retired Colonel appeared in the Spectator magazine in August 1958 and then in Hughes’ second collection Lupercal. The date is important, because 1956 was the year of the Suez Crisis, the last occasion when Britain acted as a great power, and often taken as the real end of the British Empire.
The poem is rather double-edged. Towards the end there is a tinge of regret for the grandeur of the era that has now passed for ever and already seems impossibly remote. The colonel is a figure to be mocked yet respected, representing something bigger than himself.
The very structure of the poem seems to emphasise the passage of time. With its overlapping lines, it’s a more modern type of verse than the Edwardian patriotic ballads of Kipling and Newbolt that we might associate with such a character.
The Retired Colonel
Who lived at the top end of our street
Was a Mafeking stereotype, ageing.
Came, face pulped scarlet with kept rage,
For air past our gate.
Barked at his dog knout and whipcrack
And cowerings of India: five or six wars
Stiffened in his reddened neck;
Brow bull-down for the stroke.
Wife dead, daughters gone, lived on
Honouring his own caricature.
Shot through the heart with whisky wore
The lurch like ancient courage, would not go down
While posterity’s trash stood, held
His habits like a last stand, even
As if he had Victoria rolled
In a Union Jack in that stronghold.
And what if his sort should vanish?
The rabble starlings roar upon
Trafalgar. The man-eating British lion
By a pimply age brought down.
Here’s his head mounted, though only in rhymes,
Beside the head of the last English
Wolf (those starved gloomy times!)
And the last sturgeon of Thames.
The Good Reader 