I HAVE been dipping again into the collected poems of Charles Causley, the Poet Laureate we never had, both for sheer pleasure and also because Causley was a modern master of the ballad form — reinventing, reinvigorating it, and putting it to good contemporary use. I am using the ballad form myself for my Arthurian poems, and I hoped to sit at the feet of a master and learn.

But, aside from the ballads I was revisiting, I found again his almost perfect poem, “Eden Rock”, written when he was in his seventies. It went through me with all its clarity, its shy slant rhymes, and the sudden joyful shock of its ending, as though I were reading it for the first time. It is marvellous how a poem can be so specific and detailed, and yet so capable, as all poetry should be, of gesturing beyond itself. It starts, familiarly, disarmingly enough:

They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.

My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.

You see the images so clearly that you hardly notice the deft music of the poem working on you in its hidden way: the way “dress” is picked up and half echoed by “grass” and “hat” by light, the “nearly but not quite” of the half rhymes taking on the suggestive otherness of the phrase “somewhere beyond” in the opening line.

The poem goes on to describe his two parents setting out a picnic for three, his mother pouring tea out of a Thermos into the three “tin cups painted blue”. And then she “shades her eyes and looks my way, Over the drifted stream.” And it dawns on the reader that this is more than memory. And then comes that final verse with its last line set apart, floating beyond the rest of the stanza:

They beckon to me from the other bank.
I hear them call, “See where the stream-path is!
Crossing is not as hard as you might think.”

I had not thought that it would be like this.

Suddenly, you find yourself rereading the whole poem in a new light. Andrew Motion once said that if he could write a line as perfect as the one which closes this poem, he would go to his grave a happy man.

I called Causley “the Poet Laureate we never had” because he was, in fact, considered for the post in the year that Ted Hughes became Laureate, and Hughes himself said later: “Before I was made Poet Laureate, I was asked to name my choice of the best poet for the job. Without hesitation, I named Charles Causley.” Hughes went on to say: “I was pleased to hear that in an unpublished letter, Philip Larkin thought the same and chose him too.”

I am sure that Causley has his laurel leaves now, on the other side of that stream.