I love "bat-winged demi-god," I had one of his minions for history
studies :)
dc
arthur seeley wrote:
> 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.
|