lost poems

There is quite a long article in the Telegraph about the poet Geoffrey Hill, nowadays Sir Geoffrey Hill, and Oxford professor of poetry.  He is, according to the article, arguably our greatest post-war poet.  I think the qualifying use of the word 'arguably' betrays a slight lack of conviction on the part of the author, since you could argue for anybody.  I could argue that Pam Ayres was our greatest post-war poet, though it might not be a very good argument, and you might not believe me. Certainly there is a consensus that his poetry is difficult.

I fell in love with one of his poems at school, so much so that I could almost recite it verbatim over twenty years later.  I did not remember the author or the title of the poem, and because I was a nicely brought up and deeply rule abiding child I did not do what lots of other people seem to have done, and hung on to my English Literature O level poetry textbook.  It went like this:

I will consider the outnumbering dead:
For they are the husks of what was rich seed.
Now, should they come together to be fed,
They would outstrip the locusts' covering tide.

Arthur, Elaine, Mordred; they are all gone
Among the raftered galleries of bone.
By the long barrows of Logres they are made one,
And over their city stands the pinnacled corn.

I have no idea why I liked it so much, apart from the fact that I was into Mary Stewart's Merlin chronicles at the time, and that I considered the poem to be utterly beautiful, as I still do.  The trouble with remembering poetry is that you can't be sure you've got it entirely right.  Nowadays, someone seems to have put most poems up somewhere on the internet, and a fragment typed into Google will generally get you where you want to go, though if you really want to be sure I'd double check afterwards in a book.  Poems on the web have a way of mutating like folk music, with small changes and alterations.

Back in the late 1990s the internet was not the fount of information which it has since become, and so I went and asked at the Poetry Library in the Southbank Centre.  They claim to be the most comprehensive and accessible collection of poetry from 1912 in Britain, but the bearded young man on the desk could not help me with my poem.  He thought it might have been Robert Lowell.  That was not a bad guess, given that according to the Telegraph's article, Geoffrey Hill's greatest poetic influences at Oxford during the 1950s were American.  A few years later, once I had the resources of Google, I found it, and discovered the identity of the author, and that it was called Merlin.

Google does not work infallibly for lost poems.  I am still searching for the full text of a barely remembered poem about the European author's geography teacher, a victim of war, heard once in translation on the car radio while driving through Hendon.  The next year the rascals of history murdered the teacher of geography, or words to that effect, has not proved a sufficient clue, though Googling it now brings up my query on the Poetry Library Lost Quotations page as the first search item.  It has still not had any replies since 11 October 2010.