It’s that time of year again. The time for marking papers and preparing exams. Sometimes paper-marking inspires fits of anger and frustration. Other times it inspires poetry, which I offer to our readers below, with apologies to Lewis Carroll.
Comment overreach:
He looked again and found
An eccentricity of speech.
“Perhaps I’d better look,” said he,
“For someone else to teach.”
He thought he saw true talent
In an essay on Descartes:
He looked again and what he found
Quite rent his hopeful heart.
“I feel like quitting now,” he pined,
Before I even start.”
He thought he saw, but for a time,
A brilliant simile:
He looked again and saw instead
A bad analogy.
“If this be reasoning,” quoth he,
“Then reason I shall flee.”
He thought he saw an argument
With solid evidence:
He looked again: a mere assertion
Struggled to make sense.
“My brain is weary,” he complained,
“At such a lame defence.”
He thought he saw, while reading this,
A clever turn of phrase:
He looked again and, sad to say,
Sheer doggerel met his gaze.
“He’d best leave verse to other folk
Who know poetic ways.”
© David T. Koyzis, 2010
I invite readers to come up with their own stanzas, following the paper-marking theme, and leave them in the comments below. The metrical pattern is 8.6.8.6.8.6 iambic.
April 13th, 2010 | 8:55 am | #1
Oh, come now, Koyzis, do you think we bloggers have the time to sit and manufacture these obnoxious bits of rhyme? We can’t keep its and it’s-es straight, much less write verse sublime.
April 15th, 2010 | 12:23 am | #2
She went to class with hopes that they
Had understood the reading.
Alas, alack, she sadly found
Their attention span so fleeting.
If only they knew how to read,
This class they wouldn’t be repeating.
April 15th, 2010 | 11:17 pm | #3
He thought he saw a brilliant proof,
Both elegant and taut.
But sadly, it relied upon
Division by a nought.
“I must be on my toes, or these
Mistakes will not be caught.”
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