Daylight Again?

'We must not let daylight in on magic'
wrote the journalist Walter Bagehot
(pronounce Badget) in 1867, about the public
viewing the openly grieving Queen Victoria
clearly missing Albert as she performed
the royal duties that she alone could do
for a public who were kept at such a distance
from her, that they only knew who she was
and what she did by what a tame press wrote about her.

But grief and duty are part of a long list
of markers of life best not looked at too closely
if they are going to maintained in an age of deference and wide disparities
of wealth and poverty, health and disease,
crime and cruelty also thrive when the public
averting their eyes from them, the less
to be offended by the effect of knowing
what happens when they are left unwatched.

And by the time hem,
ing unobserved
 best left unseen,
many a family only     of royalty