YOU MAY WANT TO DROWN England’s poet laureate in his butt of sack when you read his new quatrain “Causa Belli.” Not that Andrew Motion is a particularly bad example of his species: Between Dryden in 1670 and Wordsworth in 1843, the laureateship went to Thomas Shadwell, Nahum Tate, Nicholas Rowe, Laurence Eusden, Colley Cibber, William Whitehead, Thomas Warton, Henry Pye, and Robert Southey. If you’ve actually read poems by more than two people on that list, you’re spending far too much time in libraries. Go outside. Look at the beautiful trees. Think about how human beings once cut down trees like those to make paper on which to publish Shadwell and Cibber. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a library shelf.

Actually, there may be something comforting in the fact that Andrew Motion is jostling for his place among the Shadwellians–a sort of comforting continuity of mediocrity in our ever-tumbling world. Here is Motion’s “Causa Belli” in its entirety: