What rhymes with Leeward Islands ?

Gather up your catalogue, don't forget your pen,
Hurry to the auction room, it's sale time once again.

Very shortly now it will be the big day for our March auction. Well, the big two days in fact (and if we had internet bidding it would have to be the big week). She is all ready and we have even dressed her in virgin white this time.

In the next few days she will be dismembered and redistributed (this is where the wedding analogy breaks down) and she will soon be just another catalogue on the shelf.  It would be a fine thing to compose some commemorative verse, an encomium by which to remember her, but none of us here would claim to be poets. Philatelists rarely are, although my colleagues are sometimes inspired when they come across, for example, a whaling item from Nantucket.

Poets on Stamps as a collecting theme is however perfectly possible and in April such a collection may be further swelled by this well-designed issue from the U.S.A. featuring ten Twentieth Century Poets. All present deserve the accolade although one might quibble about the omissions. No Ginsberg ? No T. S. Eliot ? No Robert Frost either, though he was given his own stamp already back in 1974.

Poetry about Philately is another matter for, frankly, most of it is awful. Kipling’s The Overland Mail is the usual jingoistic, patronising trumpet call. Robert W. Service (the ‘Bard of the Yukon’, composer of The Shooting of Dan McGrew), lived in his youth with his grandfather, the postmaster of Kilwinning in Ayrshire, and later contributed the poem, Stamp Collector. To give you a flavour:

Behold my gem, my British penny black;
To pay its price I starved myself a year;
And many a night my dinner I would lack,
But when I bought it, oh, what radiant cheer!
Hitler made war that day - I did not care,
So long as my collection he would spare.

As Nick Kerridge would say, this is wrong in so many ways, but it just about achieves the usual mediocre standard of most philatelic doggerel. I am currently working through an obscure volume of verse from 1903, The Stamp Fiend’s Raid by W.E. Imeson, and cannot say that I have yet found a line of beauty. Plenty of interest and charm, but that is a subject for another day.

Sad to say, just one poem seems incontrovertibly worthy: W.H. Auden’s Night Mail, written for the superlative documentary film made by the G.P.O. Film Unit in 1936 and still today one of his most irresistible works. To put us on the right track for another busy auction week here are just a few lines:

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers' declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong

JG