Ballade of great affection

The restive audience coughs and shifts and sighs,
The lecturer is forty minutes late.
Thinking of how at home his supper fries,
Hib's face is frozen in a mask of hate—
Perhaps we've all been wrong about the date?
The vote of thanks will be a pack of lies,
But standing there, oblivious to Fate,
Is dear old David with his frayed grey flies.


The slides (if any) will be odd in size,
And look like mud-pies in a half-baked state,
Our academic calmness quite belies
The mounting tension that we can't abate,
What platitudes we gibber now, and prate,
As in each mouth, the tongue, drink-longing, dries.
Still, someone's unconcerned, at any rate—
Our dear old David with his frayed grey flies.


The lecturer (if he comes) will take the prize
For dullness or for madness, he will sate
Us all with facts, or else, with wild surmise,
Will shriek out nonsense from his addled pate,
Belch drunkenly, or drop (with pleasure) great
Bricks, or hoot in strange unmeaning cries:
Our chairman, though, urbane, polite, sedate,
Is dear old David with his frayed grey flies.

Envoi

Prince, when I stand a suppliant at Your Gate,
May I then see, with Peter in the skies,
Beaming a welcome (halo not quite straight),
Our dear old David with his frayed grey flies.

22 March 1957

NOTES

• note at the end of the poem 'For Mary and Michael, from Stuart, 22 March 1957'
• subhead to the poem: '(To David Talbot Rice)'
• Charles Thomas’ comments (in a letter 10-i-1998): 'This was some visiting grandee who gave a lecture at George Square on Byzantium or the like. SP wrote this afterwards, a day or so after we went back for a drink at his place. The joke was David Talbot-Rice's always rather baggy suits, which fascinated SP. In line 4 Hib. is Hibberd, the surly old servitor who did the slides (and always got them in the 7 possible wrong ways before getting the 8th right one). Mary and Michael Gough (MG then the lecturer in Classical Archaeol., who left to head the British School at Ankara in ?1962/3,) were close friends—MG a very dapper person—who shared the Frayed Flies joke.'
• David Talbot Rice (1903–1972) English archaeologist, Byzantinist and eminent art historian. Professor of Fine Art at Edinburgh contemporary with SP; they were colleagues and friends