August 10, 1869

The poet and art critic, Laurence Binyon, (August 10, 1869 to March 10, 1943) is perhaps overdue for a revival of public acclaim. Here is a brief look at his career.

'Laurence Binyon was a poet, playwright, art-historian (an authority on Far Eastern painting), and in his old age a professor of literature, though employed for most of his working life as a civil servant in the British Museum's Department of Prints and Drawings. He was born, a vicar's son, in Lancaster in 1869 and went to St Paul's, one of the great public schools, and Trinity College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry. In 1893 he joined the staff of the British Museum and stayed there, off and on, until 1934, retiring as Keeper of Prints and Drawings. In 1904 he married Cicely Powell: they had three daughters. In 1916, now aged forty-seven, he served as an orderly with the Red Cross on the Western Front. His book about it all, For Dauntless France, was published in 1918.

'Post-war he went back to the Museum where, as well as his day job as a Keeper, he wrote books on (among other things) Blake, eighteenth-century English watercolourists (Girton, Cotman, Towne), and Persian and Japanese art. His own Collected Poems came out in 1931 when he was already sixty-two. The following year he was appointed Companion of Honour and the year after that Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. Then in 1940, now aged seventy-one, he became Byron Professor of English Literature in Athens University. His tenure was cut short in 1941 by the German invasion and occupation. Binyon died in Reading in 1943. Four years later the first, and only, part of his Arthurian verse trilogy was published under the title The Madness of Merlin.

'While he was at Oxford he met Robert Bridges who showed him Gerard Manley Hopkins's still unpublished poems. Binyon himself began writing poetry in what Hopkins called Ôsprung rhythm' which simply means paying attention to the stresses and letting the unstressed syllables to take care of themselves. It was a style he followed for the rest of life. His plays, too, were in verse. One, Attila, staged in 1907 was set to music by Sir Charles Stanford. Binyon was also interested in the spoken verse movement associated with Masefield. It's said, as well, that he introduced Edward Thomas to Robert Frost (who then persuaded Thomas to write poetry). He was also a friend of Ezra Pound and Arthur Waley, the translator of Chinese poetry into English.'


Binyon spent most of his career in the British Museum, so he knew Max, the museum cat, the topic of a recent book. With a bit of tongue-in-cheekiness the biographer of Max, opines that

'Its...inappropriate... a cat should be commemorated in sheer doggerel, like Edith's Nesbitt the bland leading the bland. Laurence Binyon would tell you the rot set in with Thomas Gray's (1748) "Ode on the Death of a FAvorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes"...'

Requiescat: A Cat's Life at the British Museum is this biography by Nigel Barley (2013).





We have forgotten Binyon, and here, is a reason why I think we should not:

In the high leaves of a walnut

In the high leaves of a walnut,

On the very topmost boughs,

A boy that climbed the branching bole

His cradled limbs would house.

On the airy bed that rocked him

Long, idle hours he'd lie

Alone with white clouds sailing

The warm blue of the sky.

I remember not what his dreams were;

But the scent of a leaf's enough

To house me higher than those high boughs

In a youth he knew not of,

In a light that no day brings now

But none can spoil or smutch,

A magic that I felt not then

And only now I touch.