Responses in the Cathedral

I'm the verger, Sir, and since
you're on your own and not with the party
I could show you round

We begin at the font:

it's usual.

This is the crossing: they say it's a world wonder
and (in a manner of speaking, Sir, unique).
There're lots of tales of the builder's desperate worry
and how a man was killed
while they were at it.

I've heard tales of a Crossing: that was unique
and a wonder;
the Architect faced his most difficult problem,
and while they were at it
a Man was certainly killed—
in a manner of speaking.

And now this way to the tombs, Sir:
they say they're very fine
and we always finish up here.
You'll find all the names and dates in the book, Sir,
in the last edition.

Someone said it was a fine and private place
to finish up in.
But I don't want to see the book
because I'm afraid of the names and dates in it—
especially in the last edition.

maybe just post-WWII

EDITORS' NOTE

• Responses . . . is a puzzle. The poem appears in Nancy Sandars' Evening Primroses (2016, Agenda Editions, 11) as her own work. Sandars (1914–2015, prehistorian and translator) was a longstanding friend of SP, colleague and also a poet. Her version of Responses . . . was published posthumously presumably by John Fuller who signed the Preface in the book. Whether she, who knew Stuart of old, had a typescript of his poem in her papers and was thus assumed by Fuller to be her own work, or vice versa the TS version in Stuart's archive is his original or by Sandars, is uncertain. But SP's authorship is made more probable by his comment to Anna Ritchie (see note to his poem To Anna here) that he had been tinkering with the poem for some time (1973).
• The same applies to a poem called Sequence, again in Evening Primroses, 28. Stuart P has a TS version in his papers which is titled The Wood and the Trees. It is divided into the same several sections (i, ii, iii etc) as Sandars' version with only a few alterations of words in the text from hers. It's obviously the same poem, but by which of them?
• The queries continue in Sandars' Grandmother's Steps (2002, Agenda, 59), where a short poem of two verses duplicates Section iv of SP's The Wood and the Trees/Sandars' Sequence. In Grandmother's Steps it's called All of us. This title—part of the first line of the poem—looks perhaps as if her editor (Rosalind Ingrams) has had to make up a title for an unnamed poem. But who knows?

NS and SP did correspond so could have, with the passage of years, mistaken his and hers. All reproduced here in good faith.