Just like everybody else, Kate and William have had to make note of their occupations on their children's birth certificates. Birth certificates are legal documents, and so the Duke and Duchess have always had to fill them out correctly, as have many parents, after the arrival of each royal baby, and not shy away from their status. Read more: Queen to miss Commonwealth Games with Prince Charles set to step inĪlthough they do all they can to give their brood relatively typical childhoods, Kate and William cannot always escape the fact that they're royals. The couple have taught their children to treat others with respect, and have shielded them from the limelight.
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Each birth has brought delight to both The Firm and royal fans.ĭespite their lives of privilege, Kate and William have always tried to provide their three children with somewhat normal upbringings, whilst abiding by royal protocol and tradition. Nearly a decade later, and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge now have three children - George, nine, Charlotte, seven, and Louis, four. Today, Prince George celebrates his ninth birthday. The phrase ‘thatch-hung consciousness of hamlets’ is good, neatly combining a physical image of Olde England with the deep-rooted ideas we have about Englishness (‘hamlets’ summons the traditional English village, as well as half-hinting at the thatched world of Shakespeare’s England, thanks to the suggestion of Hamlet), while the later reference to Virgil’s Georgics underscores the superannuated look and feel of this old England now the pylons have arrived.Nine years ago today, on July 22, 2013, fans of the Royal Family and members of the press from around the world held their breath outside St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, London, as they waited for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to emerge, holding their newborn son. The harsh alliteration, almost spat out, of ‘statement of their steel’ plays off against the internal rhyme in the next line between ‘Nature’ and ‘architecture’. Written in irregular blank verse, Snaith’s poem takes a critical position towards these new industrial interlopers: the pylons represent ‘new thoughts, new habits’ which threaten the traditions of the past, which are ‘being trod down like flowers dropped by children’. Unheeded by these new-world, rational towers. Looks grey with antiquity as his dead forbears,Ī half familiar figure out of the Georgics, In the shoulder-hinged half-circle Millet knew, TraditionsĪre being trod down like flowers dropped by children.Īlready that farm-boy striding and throwing seed Into the thatch-hung consciousness of hamlets Yet are they outposts of the trekking future. It might be some experiment of the soil’s. The statement of their steelĬontradicts Nature’s softer architecture.Ī wall, a plough, a church so coloured of earth One after one they lift their serious shapes He published a number of volumes of poetry, including April Morning in 1926 (published by Virginia Woolf’s own Hogarth Press, making tracking down a copy for anything less than a king’s ransom impossible), North (1934), Fieldfaring (1935), and The Flowering Thorn (1946). Born in 1903, Snaith worked as a librarian and was also a keen mountaineer (one of the first results that comes up following a quick Google search of his name is this 1937 Spectator review of his book detailing a number of excursions to Everest – the summit, of course, would not be reached for another sixteen years).
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But let’s sketch out a few of the (sketchy) details of his life. He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page (not even a ‘stub’), and his name is absent from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ( ODNB).
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The name Stanley Snaith, it’s fair to say, isn’t exactly a famous one in the world of twentieth-century English verse. The forgotten English poet Stanley Snaith also wrote a poem about them. But Spender’s wasn’t the only ‘pylon poem’ written in the 1930s about these new industrial features of the English landscape.