The Gargoyle.(A comment on adverse literary
criticism.)


He took us for English Lang. and Lit.,
Old Prut.
Richard the Second, Silas Marner,
The Elegy, Michael and Shanter
and the rest, he taught to us.

Billowing down corridors,
volumes folded under arm,
swirl of black gown,
bat-winged demi-god,
he terrified us with Tam,
echoes of his eldritch Wow!,
froze bumptious boys classrooms away.

Through him Old Gaunt lived
and died again.
I wept for the toils of Michael, alone,
building beside a tumultuous brook.

I loved the man.
He gave me poetry
and quiet joy for all my days.

It was his dog I hated.

A scabby cur.
Part Pug, part Airedale, part Satan,
it lurked
under the red tasselled velvet cloth
that covered the table in his room.
The floor would rumble
with imprecations
as you slippered over the carpet
with your offering.

One day, called away,
he left me with the gargoyle.
A mere child
alone upon the threshold of hell.

Shedding stony flakes of mange,
snorting for breath,
through flattened nose, grumbling
through slobber- swung jowls,
it slouched from its lair,
glued me to the floor
with a snarled rictus
of white fangs that averred
disembowelment if I blinked;
passed so close to me I smelt the sulphur
of its breath; saw damned souls
writhing in the fires of its eyes;
took my book,
and all the beauty I had mounted there,
and chewed it to a slimy plug.

Prut apologised.
The dog did not.

So I love poetry
but hate the gargoyle
muttering distant thundery curses
from beneath a tasselled cloth.
                                 Regards Arthur.