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A:With some parallax view on the subject, I feel confident in citing “The Song of Physics” as His Majesty’s first true masterwork. Here we see the culmination not only of literary talent and real-world insight, not only of that famous wit, but also of generational outreach. The song is fundamentally a parting gift from son to father, and should be appreciated as such.

Q:It’s a much longer poem than anything he’d previously attempted, true?

A:Not only longer, but more universal in every sense. Here is a piece written with the future—not the present—in mind. With an audience which includes the Queendom, but is not limited to it. Of course, it’s the audacity of the project that truly inspires: the universe in twenty stanzas, with simple language and a compulsively tractable—one might almost say childish—cadence of melody.

Q:A gift to all of us, then. To posterity.

A:A parting gift, I would say, on the eve of a perilous exile. The poem is ebullient, but the gesture itself has an old-fashioned air, of separation and mortality. Just in case, we used to say. If this meeting be our last, have this token for thy memory of me. And so we shall.


Critic Laureate Julia Aimes,

in a Q299 interview with Fusiliers magazine


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Framed