OLD MANDARIN'S CHRISTMAS TREE

With Twelve Candles

• By CHRISTOPHER MORLEY SHAKESPEARE IN JUNIOR HIGH I'm reading Shakespeare, Fourteen Years confessed: He's tops! I don't suppose in Junior High We get it all: but gee, I like him best When he writes about Me. He makes me cry! Could I say that, in my English test?

Say it; and you, musicians of the spheres, Know that your glory never was so great As when our humble parallel appears, And in the Universal agony You recognise, condone, and sublimate The all-devouring all-transmuting Me.

Bespeak us when we were savage, young, and pure: When we lived, not studied, literature: Sonnets not fourteen lines, but fourteen years.

WASTING SHAKESPEARE'S TIME On my Grand Climacteric (When 1 entered my 63rd year) I was showing the Old Mandarin A shelf of books I had written.

I think he was quite surprised, After all, I said, in self-defence, I've lived ten years longer than Shakespeare did.

His remark was razor: If only Shakespeare could have had Those extra ten years.

THE APES One evening when the apes (My private love-name for grandchildren) Wouldn't eat their supper, I said in despair, Well, let's put the children in the icebox, And put the rice pudding to bed.

They thought this was really funny: They shrilled with laughter: Poor babes, it was their first experience Of amphibology.

Or was it oxymoron?

150th ANNIVERSARY OF THE EDINBURGH REVIEW The Edinburgh Review Was founded in 1802.

In every college seminar Its best-known words still are This will never do.

The truth (as students say, no kid) Is, it never did.

Except the author, what men love most Is a real ribroast, A barbecue.

The Edinburgh was full of spine, And it went down the drain lang syne, But even old and tired and shabby I'll probably re-read Tintern Abbey.

THE SUB-IMAGO " The water is crystal clear And good for the nymph," Says the instruction for anglers At a village'well-named Hook. "Trout of aldermanic proportions. A devotee of the sub-imago."

A day with the dry fly, A dusk with dry sherry, The angler muses Those trouts are not alderinen But modernist poets. AVANT-GARDE If I could only make this One great omnibus letter To everyone 1 know!

But a whole new shepherds' pie Of poetry and fiction and philosophy Is now the compulsory fashion And I haven't yet duly digested The writers who were avant-garde In the Nineteen-teens.

Every vanguard Needs its own fanguard. Every Papacy finds its bliss In uniformed Swiss.

THOUGHT IN THE LIBRARY Sometimes I wish That Profs Thrall and Hibbard (Handbook to Literature, 1936) Hadn't listed Pippa Passes As "closet drama."

BIRTH OF A JOURNALIST When my youngest grandson Was one week old He was taken with a luxurious burp Which so shook him That he opened his eyes to see what had happened And reached out to try to catch it.

DIAL CALL Deep calleth unto deep (Said Psalm 42,vii) But also shallow unto shallow (Said the Old Mandarin) And gets more prompt reply.

INSTRUMENT DISCONNECTED If Wordsworth had had a telephone It would have been answered by Dorothy.

If Doctor Johnson had had a telephone It would have been answered by Yale University.

If Walt Whitman had had a telephone It would never have been answered at all.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY My large and liberal lassitude Is not merely crassitude I think of all I have loved best, And play my thoughts close to my vest.

I give myself a sieve-and-screening, Ask when-and-where-and-what had meaning? So, frying in my private grease, I am my own museum-piece.

CLIMACTERIC I often think, Hurrying down the drive To catch our one-a-day mailbox, It was stupid 1 didn't learn to loaf Till I was sixty-two. - If you learn too late, No matter how lovingly you idle There's no longer time to pay your neighbours The compliments they deserve.

Your older neighbours have died of overwork, The younger haven't grown up to loafing.

But, now I'm old enough to admit everything, If they tell you I was a misanthrope Or even a misogynist