Among the considerable number of Charles Tomlinson's poems to be published in the TLS over the years, "The Rich" is one of two poems in an atypically lighter tone, the other one being "Class", that appeared in the paper in 1973. (Much closer to Tomlinson's usual voice is "To Ivor Gurney" – "Driving north, I catch the hillshapes, Gurney" – addressed to the author of our previous Poem of the Week.) Tomlinson included neither poem in his Selected Poems, 1955–1997, the elegant contents of which tend to disdain the lower business of satire. (It will be interesting to see if they have made it into his new Collected Poems, to be published this month; a review will appear in a forthcoming issue.) Yet there is an easy wit to "The Rich", with its rise to the fervent pitch of that "scorned advantage", which the rich will voluntarily give away in a moment of revolutionary fervour, followed by a mocking, Betjemanesque rhyme: "They know that it can't happen / In Worthing or Wantage". Given the range of his interests, across time, space and art, these are perhaps the last places on earth where one might look for Charles Tomlinson.

The Rich



I like the rich – the way
they say: 'I'm not made of money':
their favourite pastoral
is to think they're not rich at all –
poorer, perhaps, than you or me,
for they have the imagination of that fall
into the pinched decency
we take for granted. Of course,
they do not want to be wanted
by all the skivvies and scrapers
who neither inherited nor rose.
But are they daft or deft,
when they proclaim themselves
men of the left, as if prepared
at the first premonitory flush
of the red dawn
to go rushing into the street
and, share by share,
add to the common conflagration
their scorned advantage?
They know that it can't happen
in Worthing or Wantage:
with so many safety valves
between themselves and scalding,
all they have to fear
is wives, children, breath and balding.
And at worst
there is always some sunny
Aegean prospect. I like the rich –
they so resemble the rest
of us, except for their money.

CHARLES TOMLINSON (1973)

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