THE ENDURING UNPOPULARITY OF LADY GRENFELL

 

 

I

 

Was it the Doctor or his wealthy bride

who made the wedding wait upon the mansion

in this plain land of calloused helping hands and

grateful survivors, self-taught and self-made?

 

A fundraising tour gave rise to the storybook

romance on shipboard.  He always told the truth:

without her, the Grenfell Project would have failed.

For her part, when she took the wedding veil,

 

she put on her husband’s ambition like a habit,

labored in his works, served hosts of guests

and wrote his thirty books at his request.

Push a button at the Centre, learn

her housework suffered, the official word

on her achievement, mean and British-ish.

 

II

 

At once too strange and too conventional,

her great mistake – lacking his chances to be

one of the boys, with sailors braving the Sea

of Labrador – was to fail to be one of the girls.

 

His rise to greatness was grounded in the downtrod,

so he lived their lives and swam and fished

and preached their earthy fundamental wish

for betterment, and they floated his vast imago.

 

But she imported the ante-bellum way

of her father’s South and farmed her babies out

for feeding, made servants of her neighbors, flouting

large-hearted customs of those whose liberty

depended upon the sharing of what they had.

It all went to show that they had nothing to add.