As laureate, Marsh preferred to write poems on occasions such as the birth of a prime ministerial baby. But the fact New Zealand even has a poet laureate in 2022 suggests there is still an appetite for public poetry, even if the days of poems on the death of a queen are numbered. The procession will take place tomorrow afternoon, and then the monarch’s coffin will rest in Westminster until her funeral on Monday. Laughs with the Queen and keeps her wise. The first time I met the Queen, she said the same thing as Tony Blair: ‘You don’t have to do anything' Andrew Motion

Tse’s reticence perhaps echoes the complicated thoughts of Selina Tusitala Marsh, a recent former laureate, on performing her poem “Unity” for the queen in 2016. For Marsh, the British Crown’s colonial legacy (as she put it, “Her peeps also colonised my peeps”) made writing and performing the poem a complex commission to accept. The Queen arrives at the Annexe looking rather nervous #60yearsagotoday #coronation60th June 2, 2013 Westminster Abbey (@wabbey)His “ Floral Tribute” to the queen on her death is a double acrostic, the first letter of each of its lines spelling “Elizabeth” twice. Armitage has described this as a “problem to which the poem becomes a solution,” enabling him to “stretch [his] imagination” and “encode” Elizabeth’s name, connecting it with the “little signs and signals” of poetry of Elizabeth I’s age (1558-1603). That sounds a little desperate. Of the lethal doctrinal disputes that plagued the 16th century, she said: “There is Jesus Christ; the rest is a dispute over trifles.” She loathed the concepts of thought crimes and purity tests, saying that she did not want to make “windows on men’s souls.” Elizabeth II's funeral readings were almost all taken from bible passagaes, reflecting the traditional and sombre nature of the occasion. Many of the passages are well known bible readings for funerals that you may recognise. The excerpts here are smaller parts of the full verses read at the funeral. Political sensitivities excluded excellent poets. After Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s death in 1892, the post remained vacant for four years, in part because the outstanding potential successors included people like the socialist William Morris. It went eventually to the unreadably bad Alfred Austin. He is a generally sympathetic and liberal writer. This comes across well in lyrics responding to Covid-19, commissioned by the Huddersfield Choral Society from their choristers’ experiences. “ The Song Thrush and the Mountain Ash,” set to music by composer Daniel Kildane, is poignant:

Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, gave a reading that took as its theme the Orwellian idea that freedom is slavery. The Queen serves Britons and Britons serve the Queen, he said, and the Queen in her turn is also the servant of the King of Kings. "Liberty is only real when it exists under authority," the archbishop said, and people are never more free than when they are under the authority of God. Welby also recalled the coronation: "pomp and ceremony on a rainy June day, wrapped in time and custom – very British." Armitage had written “about a dozen laureate poems” before his first royal piece. He was appointed in 2019. After working as a probation officer, he has held various academic posts teaching creative writing and as Professor of Poetry at Oxford and Leeds. He is a good critic and advocate of poetry and access to literature, which he is evidently trying to use his Laureateship to advance. He is spending a week each year of his tenure touring selected libraries, giving a poetry reading, sometimes introducing a local guest poet, and trying “to involve communities where English might not be the first language.”Less repellent were many of the medieval kings, including Edward III who promoted the status of Parliament, and Henry V, the victor of Agincourt immortalised by Shakespeare.