England marred him, or so he said, walking
      the eggshell past – the road to school
in his mother’s cast-off shoes, for poverty’s sake;
     and the craftsman father planed away

as though by his own excising metal. The man
     I knew would be glad to hear of Poynter
contriving his ‘Visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon’
     in part by a mocked-up palace in little –

the imperial eye exultant at lion and lotus,
       at wit and la gloire and fomented desire,
but keen to the last for a lucid, telling show:
     how far the shadows fell, and how truly.