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.
He thought he saw a hyperbolic
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.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Rome and the Church in the United States
Archbishop Michael J. Curley of Baltimore, who confirmed my father, was a pugnacious Irishman with a taste…
Marriage Annulment and False Mercy
Pope Leo XIV recently told participants in a juridical-pastoral formation course of the Roman Rota that the…
Undercover in Canada’s Lawless Abortion Industry
On November 27, 2023, thirty-six-year-old Alissa Golob walked through the doors of the Cabbagetown Women’s Clinic in…
