A gift for old times’ sake

The Awl, which is still excellent, has a poem purportedly in the style of Philip Larkin on the UK cuts crowdsourcing farce:

An Elegy For England

We sold the swans for meat and all the toffs came ’round to feast
Big Ben went to a very wealthy sultan from the East
The price we put on Stonehenge didn’t make Boone Pickens blanch:
He bought the lot and now it sits on some West Texas ranch

We made the Queen redundant and we put the corgis down
We shopped her jewels to Beckham’s wife, who also bought the crown
The London Eye, the London Bridge, the Angel of the North
Have all been shipped to Tokyo, as will the Tate henceforth

Most prisoners went to China, where they perished in a quake
The rest were leased Down Under, as a gift for old time’s sake
We melted down the Dome and used the leftovers for scrap
We tried to sell Lloyd Webber but, well, who would buy that crap?

We hawked the best of what we were and went on with our lives
And look at us, we’re now bereft: there’s nothing left but knives

Well, quite.

Update: @anattendantlord on Twitter points out that the poem isn’t actually very Larkin stylistically – the rhyming and scansion are too simplistic, even though the subject matter and sentiment are right. I agree, and reckon that maybe Chesterton’s a better fit; he reckons Kipling. Somewhere between the two. This probably reflects the Awl’s limited poetry skills, rather than a deliberate attempt to channel earlier, more populist poets and label their work as Larkin-esque…

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