N o .123
T he T rusty S ervant
He entered the school in the time
of Joseph Warton, Headmaster and
distinguished literary critic, who himself
described the school, rather ominously,
as a ‘cage of singing birds’, and one of
the first poems preserved by the 19-year-
old Le Mesurier was written to mourn
another Head Man, Dr Burton, who is
said to have ‘particularly wished to live
’till the boys returned to School’: tone, though this relationship becomes
more complicated when he realises that
the woman he is about to marry is thus
confronted with the written evidence of
a former attachment.
‘Cry grateful Sons o’er his now breathless
Clay,
‘Twas all he wish’d, this last sad Office pay.’ ‘O spare me Love, and leave my Hopes to
tow’r
In Strength and native Vigour unconfin’d,
Nor from those Cares to Learning’s Sons
assign’d
Thus draw me loit’ring in thy wanton
Bow’r.’
Dr Burton was the first headmaster
to move out of College and into the
Commoner portion of the school, leaving
the Second Master in charge of College,
and the paintings known as ‘Dr Burton’s
Commoners’ can still be seen adorning
the walls of the Master in College’s
dining room.
Le Mesurier’s poetic facility also
allowed him to participate in Lady
Miller’s literary circle at Batheaston,
writing verses to be drawn out of the
ceremonial ‘urn’ for praise or censure;
but the poems which I find most
interesting are two sonnet sequences,
one charting six years of torturingly
unrequited love, and the other dutifully
flogging his ‘Muse’ into the service
of his highly polyphiloprogenitive
marriage – he and his wife had 15
children in 14 years. Le Mesurier didn’t
marry until he was 44, and his poetry
provides one possible answer to our age’s
prurient question of how a devout and
conventional man dealt with a prolonged
bachelorhood.
The purgative powers of poetry had
already been explored in the poem with
which he opens his notebook, rather
self-consciously entitled ‘The Author’s
Apology for Himself’. Here he explains
that ‘when the Spleen affects my Brain,/
I quickly vent it – through my Pen’, and
reassures his readers that he means ‘no
Harm’ by what he writes, but ‘merely
to relieve myself’. He does, therefore,
imagine readers, despite the confessional
Le Mesurier finds love problematic.
The first stirrings of passion see him
begging Love to leave him alone and let
him rise to his work:
The girl causes him nothing but
misery, not least because he fears in
moments of clarity that she isn’t worth
his agonies, but he is also fully aware
that expressing himself in verse leaves
him open to accusations of insincerity.
The graphic physicality of his language,
however, leaves us in no doubt of his
state:
‘…the full Tide of Anguish, fuller grown
By honour that repress’d it, thus to burst
And thus subside, the pitying Muse inspir’d.’
It all goes horribly wrong: the
moment she comes of age, she elopes
with one of her father’s footmen, leaving
Le Mesurier to tackle the conflicting
emotions of disgust, love and what looks
very like envy:
‘Foul Lust, with all its kindred vices stor’d
Burst forth [that verb again], and such the
madd’ning Rage she shar’d,
She gloried in the wild Excess she dar’d,’
Nevertheless, he ends by asserting
the quality of his love, claiming that he
will ‘with Tears bemoan/ How hardly can
a Heart like mine forget.’ And it is this
Heart which he eventually, in 1799,
brings battered but intact to the feet
of his fiancée, Margaret, reassuring
her that, despite the apparent poetic
evidence,
10
‘No, Margaret, no:‘tis now alone I love.’
Margaret could be forgiven, however,
for thinking otherwise, as the rewards
of married life seem totally to consume
Le Mesurier’s bursting creative desires,
and we might legitimately hear a tinge
of guilt in the sonnets he eventually
manages to squeeze out for her. ‘True
‘tis,’ he acknowledges, ‘now four Years
have passed/ Since fir’d by thee I tun’d the
humble Lyre’, though when we discover
that they already have four children, we
can’t be entirely surprised by his lack of
generative zeal, particularly when the
next sonnet begins
‘Yes, Marg’ret, stout your Boy is grown and
tall,
And now three Girls with Cheeks of roseate
Hue
And one more Son…’
And in 1810 he yields to
circumstances, conceding,
‘Wife! For what more of praise than that
one Name,
What more of fond Endearment can this
Heart
Imagine, or this Tongue or Pen impart?’
B