British Museum

As city ramparts and castle keeps do, so

civic building make statements – like that Attic,

Victorian temple in central London,

that bastion of imperial grandeur,

the British Museum, built to exhibit

stolen goods, and colonise the Muses,

designed by someone with the surname Smirke,

with the profits from coal, steam, and the Slave Trade.

 

Along its entire front elevation,

which includes two wings, is a wide, high

arcade whose open side is supported by

twenty four fluted Doric columns.

In the arcade, at appropriate

intervals for quiet and privacy,

are surprisingly comfortable wooden seats,

ergonomically and otherwise ideal

for ancients on a hot, humid, windless day

in late August London – while family

join the flocks, hordes of visitors to see

mummy cloths, and fragments of clay tablets.

 

The seat we have is probably the best

in the city. Across the courtyard

through the railings are plane trees in full leaf,

and red double decker buses and black cabs

jammed on Great Russell Street – which, like all

the streets and squares in the neighbourhood,

is named for an English aristocrat.

We observe the queue at the main gate –

multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, like London

with its more than three hundred languages,

a rich, ironic legacy of Empire.

 

The Museum – from the Greek mouseion,

‘seat of the Muses’ – is dressed in Portland Stone

quarried by convicts from Portland gaol Dorset.

There is no muse of architecture, nor

of prisoners or slaves, so I shall invoke

Clio, the muse of History, with her

open book and her clock!