The Poetry Course

I was stumbling through the college grounds

On a day, eight months ago,

It was wintertime, in a fading light

And the ground was covered with snow,

I was there for a course of literature

Set up by Professor Burke,

They said that he had all the answers, then,

To the Poets, and all of their work!

 

I’d never read too much poetry

What I had went over my head,

I thought there was too much imagery

To understand what they said,

The class was small, I sat by the wall

And tried to avoid his frown,

Whenever he asked a question

I was afraid that he’d put me down.

 

I didn’t know anyone else in there

I was feeling bereft, alone,

But one of the students that sat by me

Had a face that was set in stone,

He was shrunk right down in his overcoat,

And he sat there, stroking his mo,

So after the class, I followed him

And he gave me a brief: ‘Hello!’

 

I can’t ever say that we were chums,

He was far too quiet for that,

We’d wander together, lost in thought

And I was the one to chat,

He’d answer me with a short ‘Hurrumph’,

Occasionally answer: ‘Hah!’

And often he’d sound almost profound

With a short and considered: ‘Bah!’

 

The only time that he came to life

Was when Burke was discussing Rhyme,

Burke curled his lip at the thought of it,

And said: ‘It’s a waste of time!’

My friend sank down in his overcoat

And he gave out a funny sigh,

With Burke extolling the free-form art

Of the moderns, and told us why.

 

He tore up Coleridge: ‘Christabel,

Is just an unfinished dream,

And Wordsworth, him and his leeches - Well!

It seems to me quite obscene!’

He massacred Noyes and his ‘Highwayman’,

And Kipling he threw in the bin;

‘‘The Raven’ is boring, it’s much too long

And the rest of his stuff, just spin!’

 

Exams were held on a frosty night

With a hell of a fog outside,

My friend was down and dispirited,

But he wrote with a quiet pride,

The final question on rhyme was set

On ‘The Raven’ - give a critique!’

I think he would still have been writing there

If we’d had ‘til the end of the week!

 

The marks came back in a day or two,

I’d scrambled through with a pass,

My friend walked off on his own that night

His shoulders were hunched at the last,

I never ran into him after that,

He’d said, ‘I’d better just go!’

The marks for ‘The Raven’ had let him down,

They’d flunked Edgar Allan Poe!

 

David Lewis Paget

Reviews

[poeticpiers]

What annoys me is the experts who claim to know what the poet really meant.
Poets write about life as they see it in their environment in their time.
Experts are invariably totally wrong in their opinions but merely pass on what some other expert has said. What you or I write into a poem will not be read in the same way by two readers. Readers relate to their own life experiences and some times astonish the writer with their interpretations

[Erin Thomas]

Exactly. That is why there is no science or math to poetry. It is not exact or precise, it is whatever the write makes it which will be different to the reader!

[Dinesh Sairam]

The problem is, they should start teaching children prosody and meter at a young age, and not only rhyme. In fact, meter is the music of the poem and is very important to them than rhyme.

Kids who grow up with reading just rhymes seem to think that free verse or non-rhyming verse is more 'mature'. Bullshit, I say.

[Tate Morgan]

Ill second that.More mature could easily equate to lazy.To create a rhyming metered verse Is extremely hard .If it were easy everyone would do it.It is exactly that tribulation that makes it special ,that makes a verse sentient.

[BlackRose]

I so agree with these others here. It's your poetry and how you write it. How you want it to read and be read by others. It's your style, being you and not someone else. I have had some critique mine to the hilt, I still knowing it's just as good as anyone elses. And we don't expect everyone to like our works or everyone one of them or anyone else to expect it either for that matter but it's the many many others that like them that will that will count and keep us going strong. I have read many and your poetry so far is one of the very few that I can rave about. LOVE LOVE your work.

[Tate Morgan]

David great story as always and the Paget meter rings true once again.To see you so intrigued and into this again breaths new life into my soul.It leaves me hope that you being a few yrs older than me have still an impeccable child's charm when it comes to the imagination.Your works they will outlast you .As all of us wish to be told.I shall be reading your works to my granddaughter long after we are both old

[Emerald Seas]

I thought you might have been getting to that point a few stanzas before the end. Wonderful writing as always, David. Unfortunately, isn't that how it goes with some of our best loved poets from history? They didn't receive their full recognition until they were long past being absent of their last breath.