Today my ‘Blogiversary Slice’ links back to The Beauty of The Morning. Or ‘ How William Wordsworth’s famous poem brightened up my commute!’
I love poetry. I’ve written before about being obliged to learn reams of the stuff off by heart at school. ( Do you know just how long Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner is?) Happily that hasn’t inoculated me against it, even if nowadays my ageing memory rarely allows me to remember more than the odd few stanzas; not unlike forgetting the punchline of a joke!
I wonder if any of my readers remember the Enjoying Poetry anthologies back in the 1960s? Did you work your way through the different volumes: Silver and Gold, For Delight, For Your Pleasure, before reaching the dizzy heights of Book Four, A Galaxy of Poems Old and New?
There was no babying us in those days. By the age of eight or nine we were tackling material like The Diverting History of John Gilpin, Drake’s Drum, (Capten, art tha sleepin’ tha below?), Browning’s How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix, and W M Praed’s epic Sir Nicholas at Marston Moor, (To horse, to horse, Sir Nicholas! the clarion’s note is high…). Oh- and not forgetting Shakespeare of course. Heavy – duty indeed, yet however much you grumble about it at the time, it does leave you with a wonderful storehouse of treasures to draw on and to sustain you through life.
I’d love to know if you have a favourite poem from childhood . Do share it with me in the ‘Comments.’