Round About a Great Estate

Eat your heart out in cavernous envy

Capability. Fold up the Estate map and put away
The plantation, the marsh, the bridle way,
The shooting box, the loch, the little jetty,
The fish-trap chevrons down the estuary Likenesses lost in divine disarray, the key
Locked on the old order and authority,
The cult of breeding and its ascendancy.
The PRIVATE keep-out and man-trap tyranny
Of that ancien regime of cut-glass barbarity.
The photographs of staff and tenantry,
Their story in Sunday-best for posterity
Recycled now as heritage and legacy:
The guns with their bag, keeper and ghillie,
Stalker and stag, the whisky distillery,
Captain of cavalry, captain of industry The whole shooting match and gallimaufry:
A seat in the House, a seat in the country,
Every conceivable cliche and hierarchy
Shored up by portfolios of gilts and property.
Blow to the four corners your grandeur and folie
Careers in Whitehall, careers at the Embassy.
Blow too what passes for your mind: the sea
Mocks in its rock garden, mocks the gently
Falling landscapes that border so privately
Their framed view, crying out to beauty,
The seven-sided sea, with its sails full of sky.
Hear the wintry roar of its eternal battery.
Observe its genius for blunt-sheared topiary
And closest nail-scissor trim in sandy
Border, and marvel you ever had your day
Between home and far-flung colony.
Put off your self. Walk the margin of the bay,
o heir to the ruin of all you survey.

ANDREW McNEILLIE