SLIGHTLY RHYMING VERSES FOR JEFF

The late Elizabeth Smart wrote this poem to mark Jeffrey Bernard's 50th birthday. It first appeared in The Spectator in 1986 My Dear Jeff, I can't say enough how much I admire the way you have conducted your entire life, and the way you have used your marvellous Muse.

And how right she was to choose you. Because she's a Rare Bird who would have retired or died if you hadn't known how to amuse her, and her you.

That's one non-bogus marriage made on Parnassus and true.

She knew exactly what and who she was letting herself in for: the real You.

Drink, betting shops and pubs are the sort of thing that rubs her up the right way; she'll always stay and make you more beautiful and witty every day.

This is a loose love Ode, owed to one of my friends who is in my special collections of people who make amends for endless excruciating boring hours so often lived when foolishly pursuing stimulation, and none occurs.

Sterne, Benchley, Leacock, Carroll, and Nash, and Lear are not more dear to me than bedrock Bernard (3).

(Do I not pay 65p. ungrudgingly weekly, for a fixative laugh, uniquely Jeff?, who has become a consolatory addictive to me?) Wilde would have smiled and been beguiled and bright enough to know that you had a better Muse in tow than he.

Could he see the angelic emanations from gutters where we all fall, while trying to pee, and rise, or try to rise, unwisely, in majesty?

And Swift is bitter and cross and doesn't make us feel better at bearing our lot, and, in his rage at the odds, misses the old adage that recurs to me often, in every mess: `against stupidity even the gods are helpless.' He lifted furious fists but had no effect on the jibbering idjits.

Your subject is not mean, who's up, who's in, or jockeying for position (what a dreary sin).

Funny but kind, your subject is justly seen as the inexhaustible one of nude mankind: Yourself, in fact, drinking, amidst the alien corn, and explaining the amazing joke of being born.

Your sources— grief and love and the Coach & Horses and all the things we're thinking of but don't admit, because they don't fit our grand ideas of our own importance.

You hit the soul on the head when it rises out of its lying bed; pompous with portents above its station, and greedy for rewards above its ration.

But you're never snide, and you never hurt, and you wouldn't want to win on a doctored beast, and anyhow the least of your pleasures resides in paltry measures.

So guard, great joker God, please guard this great Bernard, and let 1982 be the most brilliant year he ever knew.

Let him be known for the prince of men he is, a master at taking out of himself and us the piss.

If you will do this, God, I'll be good all year, and try to be better-dressed, and soberer, and keep my prose-style clear, (for this great man is embedded in my heart) I'll remain, Sir, then and only then, Yours sincerely, Elizabeth Smart.

Elizabeth Smart wrote 'By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. The above poem is reprinted by permission from her Collected Poems (HruperCollins).