Britain's Poet Laureate Regrets Writing Rap For Prince William's 21st Birthday

Britain's Poet Laureate wishes he didn't write a rap to celebrate Prince William's 21st birthday. Andrew Motion - who steps down as royal writer on Thursday - is not happy with all of the rhymes he wrote while in office.

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He said: "Overall, I think of them as left-handed poems written by a right-handed poet. Some of them don't work at all well. I tried to write something for Prince William's 21st birthday in the style of a rap, because I thought 'he's a young person and I'll do it in a kind of humorous way.'"

"I wish I hadn't done it really, I wish I'd stayed on the higher ground. I'm pleased with the poems I wrote for the Queen Mother's 100th birthday and her death and the poem for Charles and Camilla when they got married."

"I see that one really as a partner poem to the one I wrote for Princess Diana when she was killed, which I actually wrote before I was appointed poet laureate."

Even though it is a post many poets would kill for, Motion found the job challenging and, at times, dull.

He told Britain's BBC News: "They are very difficult poems to write - the sense of 'commissionedness' is almost overpowering. You write them knowing that the great majority of people reading them will judge them not on how good or bad the poem is but on how the reader happens to feel about the royal family."

"Having to pitch poems about difficult subjects, poems about events in the royal calendar, into a place where they are simply bound to get bounced regardless of their merit, those things have a certain tiresomeness."

"But the post should most emphatically continue because for all its oddities it is the single most high-profile thing that exists on behalf of poetry."

Motion has been Poet Laureate for 10 years. In this time he wrote eight royal rhymes, including ones celebrating the Queen Mother's 100th birthday and Prince Charles wedding to Camilla.