AARON AND GEORGE BETA

{The Aaron in the poem below is quite real; my mother claimed she was descended from him.}

Bad enough to have a king who’d gone mad

But little harm was done. He didn’t declare war

Against Luxembourg nor insist that women

Be allowed to manage their own property.

No, a mad king had his points, uniting the country.

Even the Radicals could pity an aging man

Whom Reason had abandoned. Worse, though,

Was when he began to fly – not sensibly

In one of Montgolfier’s balloons – but as if he

Was himself a balloon, his heels lifting off the ground

His body softly rising towards the ceiling.

A window left incautiously open meant gardeners

Crick-necked from peering at the tree-tops.

He had feared not madness but blindness

And that, too, came in time.

He had provided against it by memorizing

All of Handel’s keyboard music

Which he played like a king

With great assurance but not very well

Charles James Fox sent a note to William Pitt

That he had heard of a man in Germany –

A Jew; a rabbi of all things! named Aaron

Witnesses swore he floated when he prayed

No matter how many rocks the rebbetzin

Sewed into his pockets. The diplomat sent

To summon Aaron to Whitehall found

The rabbi was already on his way there.

He died en route; a minyan appeared from somewhere

(The peasants swore no other Jews had been

Within miles of the town where he died),

Bathed his corpse; kept it company through the night;

Buried it properly, and with due respect.

Good enough, but mercy is a harsh mistress

And Aaron not a man to leave an errand

Uncompleted. His soul crossed the Channel

In the last of the old boats which had once

Carried all the dead of Gaul to Albion.

They’d given up treating the King by now

Accepting that he was mad. He spent his days

In a shabby robe, unshaved, a rope trailing

From his left ankle so that he might the easier

Be hauled down if he started floating too high.

(There was some fear that he might drift to France

Which was not a friendly place for kings just then).

The King knew the ghosts who crowded round him

Were not real. They fled when Aaron walked through them

A bold raven fluttering the phantom peacocks.

Most of the notes the King’s youngest daughter kept

Are still locked up. It is thought that the King

Taught Aaron the harpsichord. It is known

(You can find it in the Princess Lieven’s letters,

Who had it from the Duke of York) that the King

Died peacefully, recognizing his son who said

His long-bearded father had had at the end

“As fine a rabbi’s head as you could imagine.”