1. Three ‘Victorian Celebrity’ CLERIHEWS

A Clerihew is a comic verse consisting of two couplets and a specific rhyming scheme, aabb, invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956) at the age of 16. Normally the first line names a person, and the second line ends with something that rhymes with the name of the person. (From: ‘Shadow Poetry’)

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Alfred Lord Tennyson
By gift and by benison,
Through His ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’
The glory of defeat portrayed.

Joseph Rudyard Kipling
Could not be described as middling;
His output as a poet
Was immense, and don’t we know it!

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Might well have invented spaghetti;
As lover, Poet, painter
He was ever, the innovator.

The Grass Above His Grave

 The end of World War I took effect on the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918.  The inscription on this war grave in the churchyard of St.Mary’s, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, commemorates the short life of Private F.J . Harvey of the Middlesex Regiment, who sadly died just 12 days before this.
He was 18 years of age.

The Grass Above His Grave

And the grasses sway above his grave,
Reminding me of what he gave,
Of hopes as his new life began,
No more a boy, nor yet a man.

*     *     *

The promises of a war, just ended,
Lay before him, starkly spread.
Tempting him to rejoice
In the swollen face of victory.

A life to live, a promise to keep,
Beckoned his youth to greater glory,
But time and life were not for him,
Nor was death a friend.

They conspired to rob him of
The future he had bought,
And, in victory, the fate of so many
Became his own fate too.

*     *     *

And the grasses sway above his grave
Reminding me of what he gave
Of hopes as his new life began
No more a boy, nor yet a man. 

 

Photos: WHB-2020  …  ©

Morning Glory

‘Sunrise’ … Watercolour – WHB – 2014

Let me go
Let me run in the early dew
To brush against the laurel’s leaves
Tread the cool earth’s cushion
And linger in the dampness of the silent wood.

Before the cooing of the collared bird,
The bite of the new day’s busy-ness,
Its threats and promises,
Breaks into the stillness of my morning world
And ruptures this mood of mystery
Of thrill and almost menace,
Leaving me to face another day of reality
One more acceptance of the wrenching truth.