Whoo boy, that cover cameo, Max.
But at least you had a teacher who actually suggested some poems were worth reading...
Doug
On Jun 18, 2014, at 4:06 AM, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> The Golden Treasury (1952)
>
> 'Boys, this is a famous book.
> Treasure it, this treasury.
> Most of you have never had
>
> a po’try book to call your own.
> Many a family
> lacks such an anthology.
>
> Any po’try at home,
> Richards?’ I knew my dad
> had once studied some,
>
> and kept, shelved high, the books
> he’d never opened since.
> Paradise Lost was one.
>
> Were they anthologies?
> I thought I’d not mention them.
> 'Sir, my mother has a book
>
> called A Child’s Garden of Verses.'
> 'All by the one writer, lad,
> so not an anthology.
>
> A collection of flowers, see,
> selected for variety.
> That book your mother has -
>
> all by Stevenson, Robert Louis -
> (what else did he write, boys?
> Treasure Island, classic too!)
>
> all by one hand - monotonous,
> no?’ ‘You may be right, sir.’
> 'Now, boys, you see the names here?’ -
>
> pointing to title page and spine -
> ‘Palgrave at the top,
> Macmillan at the bottom.
>
> Now here’s your homework,
> and use the library: next week
> report back on these two men.
>
> And - read the poem by Marlowe
> and all by Robert Herrick. Then -
> write a version of your own.’
>
> I did: ‘The Passionate
> Motor Mechanic to his Love’.
> I all the rhyming pleasures proved.
>
> More then in my apprenticeship
> than now, they mattered
> to me, rhyme and metre.
>
> Soon I’d compiled - no stopping me -
> my very own leaden treasury.
> Palgrave? a civil servant -
>
> big deal. Macmillans - London
> publishers - so what? Poets?
> always in over-supply.
>
> 'Songs and lyrics' weren’t all they wrote.
> And were all poets dead and British?
> Yes, and out of copyrght.
>
> And why the cover cameo? -
> the title-page vignette -
> tootling a flute
>
> to his dog and a bird above,
> pan-pipes propped against
> a wild flower at his feet,
>
> a naked long-haired youth!
>
Douglas Barbour
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http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
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would you
care to be more
precise about whatever
it is you are
saying, I said
Bill Manhire
