Ave atque vale!

It's time for hail and farewell again as Britain welcomes a new poet laureate, Ted Hughes, and remembers the previous one, the late John Betjeman. In honor of the occasion we offer readers a sample of each poet's work: ``The Horses'' from Ted Hughes's ``The Hawk in the Rain'' and ``Great Central Railway, Sheffield Victoria To Banbury'' from John Betjeman's 1969 edition of ``Collected Poems.''

. . . include the 19th-century illustration art of Charles Keene, whose draftsmanship not only adorned Punch magazine but was admired by Pissarro and Degas, according to ``Art Treasures in the British Isles,'' which reproduces this self-portrait in pen and brown ink from the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.