Poet laureate Simon Armitage publishes elegy for Prince Philip

The Patriarchs – An Elegy deliberately avoids the sycophancy Philip hated, the poet says, and is instead ‘in service of all people like him’

• Read the full poem below
  

Simon Armitage has written a poem to mark the death of Prince Philip, his first to address the royals in his time as poet laureate, saying that the obituaries had taught him that Prince Philip “hated sycophancy – I didn’t want to write anything that would have sounded sycophantic in his ears”.

Titled The Patriarchs – An Elegy, the poem is published for the first time on the day of the duke’s funeral. It opens on a snowy morning – “the weather is a peculiarly British obsession,” said Armitage – and expands into a dedication to the men of Prince Philip’s generation, “great-grandfathers from birth”.

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