... dust to dust, for funeral poems it’s not the worst

IT was while watching an episode of Spooks on BBC iPlayer that my curiosity was aroused. At one of the funerals of an MI5 operative that punctuate the series, I heard the lines of a valedictory poem.

I don’t get to use the “v” word very often. It means saying goodbye, on this occasion in Ode on Solitude by the poet Alexander Pope, who died in 1744.

Celebrating the quiet life, it begins: “Happy the man, whose wish and care/A few paternal acres bound/Content to breathe his native air/On his native ground.” And blessed is the man who has peace of mind as the years slide soft away.

Pope ends the poem with: “Thus let me live, unseen, unknown; Thus unlamented let me die; Steal from the world, and not a stone/Tell where I lie.” As a requiem for the millions who live and die anonymously, often in rural isolation, seeking neither fame nor fortune, this Easter thought is about as good as it gets.

Not that Pope lived like that himself. Talk about poetic licence.

His satires on politicians and prominent people were so vitriolic that he had to carry pistols while out walking his Great Dane dog, Bounce.

Extraordinarily, Pope wrote this funeral poem in 1700 when he was only 12, a precocious child, largely self-educated because as a Catholic he couldn’t attend school and suffered from spinal tuberculosis that stunted his growth.

That his verse survives to this day, and finds a new audience in a television drama about the threat of a 21st century nuclear war, has to be a tribute to his poetic genius.

Pope pilloried fellow writers as hacks, scribblers and dunces.

He must have had me in mind.