Kingsley's Coming of Age

 Here is another from the Listener anthology. It's by Kingsley Amis, but I can't give you a date as, frustratingly, the poems in the volume are not dated (they seem to be arranged chronologically by date of birth of the poets represented, which is not very helpful). Anyway, it's a clever piece, whose relaxed air disguises a rhyme scheme of fiendish complexity: I think it goes like this – abacbdecfdeghfgh. 

Coming of Age

Twenty years ago he slipped into town,
A spiritual secret agent; took
Rooms right in the cathedral close; wrote down
Verbatim all their direst idioms;
Made phonetic transcripts in his black book;
Mimicked their dress, their gestures as they sat
Chaffering and chaffing in the Grand Hotel;
Infiltrated their glass-and-plastic homes, 
Watched from the inside; then – his deadliest blow –
Went and married one of them (what about that?);
At the first christening played his part so well
That he started living it from then on,
His trick of camouflage no longer a trick.
Isn't it a spy's rarest triumph to grow
Indistinguishable from the spied-upon,
The stick insect's to become a stick?

Clearly there's something of the confessional about this one: Amis was a famously brilliant mimic who did indeed transcribe the speech of his targets phonetically, as in this merciless account of a lecture by one of his Oxford bêtes noires, Lord David Cecil –
Laze . . . laze and gentlemen, when we say a man looks like a poet . . . dough mean . . . looks like Chauthah . . . dough mean . . . looks like Dwyden . . . dough mean . . . looks like Theckthpyum (or something else barely recognisable as 'Shakespeare') . . . Mean looks like Shelley (pronounced 'Thellem' or thereabouts). Matthew Arnold (then Prestissimo) called Shelley beautiful ineffectual angel Matthew Arnold had face (rallentando) like a horth. But my subject this morning is not the poet Shelley. Jane . . . Austen . . . '
To some extent, in Coming of Age, Amis is perhaps describing himself becoming much like the very people he once mocked and satirised, but perhaps he is also seeing himself as one who so successfully cultivated a persona that he became indistinguishable from it, as one who 'wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it' (in Orwell's phrase).