A humorous Latin poem in a newspaper

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brexit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Telegraph

The readers’ letters page in the Daily Telegraph 19 Feb 2019 included this humorous Latin elegaic poem sent in by Dr. David Butterfield (Queens’ College, Cambridge) about the Brexit:

Quid sibi vult Brexit? qui Brexitus exitus ipse?
quomodo, qua, quando terra Britanna Bregat?
nunc post lustra novem Bregere - an Brexire? - necesse est:
parsne fuit Remanens parte Abeunte minor?
vox populi, divi est; at vox repetita fit echo.
nunc referenda iterum sunt referenda plebi?
est gravius multo spectare futura Britannis:
quid referet nobis extera vita novi?
quaerere plura queam; meliora intendere malo:
Europhilos ut nos dedecet usque queri.
nam, Brecta EUropa, non parvam noster amoris
stillam Euro paean inde favente teget.

I find it difficult to find anything about Brexit amusing. It is the most disastrous policy mistake we in the UK have made since Suez.

Hi, this is fantastic! (I only just saw this.)

To give a little Textkit history, the author of this poem used to be a regular poster on Textkit: whiteoctave.

He’s definitely a classicist to watch. From memory (this goes back over a decade), he’s one of very few who won the composition prize at Cambridge in all four categories in the same year (Latin prose comp, Latin verse comp, Greek prose comp, Greek verse comp), and from memory he won the Rouse Fellowship before he had even begun his PhD.

For those practising comp on this forum, in addition to many publications, is the author of the Latin elegaics note linked in the composition board guidance post:

http://www.aoidoi.org/articles/ktl/LatinElegiacs.pdf

Cheers, Chad

When I recovered the old forum greek encodings that had been junk text for years, I was happy to discover his compositions, though I’m afraid that his line breaks still need recovery. I sent an email to let him know, but don’t know if I used the correct address.

Tis strange knowing my supervisor is a former textkit user. What other faces lurk behind these many usernames, I wonder?