John Hutton, before he settled down to the blameless task of reporting on public-sector pensions, was accused of writing poetry. He did not deny the practice but did reject the authorship of a verse about Gordon Brown, when he was still prime minister: ‘At Downing Street/ Upon the stair/ I met a man who wasn’t Blair./ He wasn’t Blair again today./ Oh how I wish he’d go away.’ Mr Hutton said: ‘I would write better poetry.’ But I have not had the pleasure of seeing any of his since.
One politician who has published poetry recently is Herman Van Rompuy, the Belgian who is President of the European Council. In Britain he is mocked on those grounds alone, but even more for having a funny name — something many foreigners have. Mr Van Rompuy’s elegant little volume, with a black ribbon bookmark, is called simply Haiku. I had the devil of a job getting hold of a copy, but one can buy one through the Poeziecentrum website.
Now, a haiku need not have 17 syllables, but it generally has a reference to a season and a break between two parts. Mr Van Rompuy keeps to these rules, and like Walter Scott, perhaps, he reads better in a foreign language. Haiku gives a choice of four, apart from English. Heaven knows what the Flemish is like to Flemings, but take this haiku: ‘Pigeons’ cooing/ awakens spring — I recall/ grandfather’s pigeon house.’ I wonder about ‘pigeons’ cooing’, which, if grammatically correct, is hardly idiomatic English. It sounds like ‘pigeons cooing’, which would make the subject of the sentence pigeons, not cooing, and require a plural verb. Otherwise one might say: ‘The cooing of doves’, which would obviate the repetition of pigeons, although, again, that is no crime.
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