Secondary 1 Scaffolded Poetry
THE RAILINGS
You came to watch me playing cricket once.
Quite a few of the fathers did.
At ease, outside the pavilion
They would while away a Sunday afternoon
Joke with the masters, urge on
their flannelled offspring. But not you.
Fielding deep near the boundary
I saw you through the railings.
You were embarrassed when I waved
and moved out of sight down the road.
When it was my turn to bowl though
I knew you’d still be watching.
Third ball, a wicket, and three more followed.
When we came in at the end of the innings
the other dads applauded and joined us for tea.
Of course, you’d gone by then. Later,
you said you’d found yourself there by accident.
Just passing. Spotted me through the railings.
Speech days. Prize-givings. School plays
The twenty-first. The Wedding. The Christening
You would find yourself there by accident.
Just passing. Spotted me through the railings.
Roger McGough
The Tyger
BY WILLIAM BLAKE
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Rupert Brooke
The Soldier
IF I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
“Metaphors” by Sylvia Plath
I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.
Song of the Witches: “Double, double toil and trouble”
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
(from Macbeth)
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Cool it with a baboon's blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.
This Is Just To Say
BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
Miss World - Benjamin Zephaniah
Beauty is about how you behold
more than silver more than gold
if I say I am beautiful
it means beauty is accessible,
beauty is about how you greet
de everyday people dat you meet
you are beautiful so all rejoice
your beauty is a natural choice.
My sister is a beautiful girl
she don't want to be Miss World
her value is not prize money
more value than a pearl
my sister is a beautiful girl
human delight
she could be out of sight but she would rather stay and fight.
Her legs are firm and strong
best for self-defence
my sister kicks like wildfire
so cause her no grievance
she won't walk the platform
to upsex people's lust
and you can't get the number of her height, age or bust,
she don't want to go to the market
to be viewed like a slave
the viewing time is over
put de judge in the grave,
she don't need to go to the market
'cause she's already won
beauty contest no contest
she don't need to run.
I talk 'bout people in society who judge you by your looks, den,
give you a number dat is written in a book, and, lustful eyes
from all around come to look at you, and, day judge your lifetime
by a quick interview.
My sister is a beautiful girl
But she don't want to be Miss World
her personality cannot be rewarded by no judge or earl.
My sister is a beautiful girl
She needs no contest
and you can't put her with another judging who's the best.
And you cannot judge my sister's heart
By looking at her breasts.
‘For Heidi With Blue Hair’, Fleur Adcock
When you dyed your hair blue
(or, at least ultramarine
for the clipped sides, with a crest
of jet-black spikes on top)
you were sent home from school
because, as the headmistress put it,
although dyed hair was not
specifically forbidden, yours was,
apart from anything else,
not done in the school colours.
Tears in the kitchen, telephone-calls
to school from your freedom-loving father:
'She's not a punk in her behaviour;
it's just a style.' (You wiped your eyes,
also not in a school colour.)
'She discussed it with me first -
we checked the rules.' 'And anyway, Dad,
it cost twenty-five dollars.
Tell them it won't wash out -
not even if I wanted to try.
It would have been unfair to mention your
mother's death, but that shimmered
behind the arguments.
The school had nothing else against you;
the teachers twittered and gave in.
Next day your black friend had hers done
in grey, white and flaxen yellow -
the school colours precisely:
an act of solidarity, a witty tease.
The battle was already won.
Advice to a Discarded Lover by Fleur Adcock.
Think, now: if you have found a dead bird,
not only dead, not only fallen,
but full of maggots: what do you feel –
more pity or more revulsion?
Pity is for the moment of death,
and the moments after. It changes
when decay comes, with the creeping stench
and the wriggling, munching scavengers.
Returning later, though, you will see
a shape of clean bone, a few feathers,
an inoffensive symbol of what
once lived. Nothing to make you shudder.
It is clear then. But perhaps you find
the analogy I have chosen
for our dead affair rather gruesome –
too unpleasant a comparison.
It is not accidental. In you
I see maggots close to the surface.
You are eaten up by self-pity,
crawling with unlovable pathos.
If I were to touch you I should feel
against my fingers fat, moist worm-skin.
Do not ask me for charity now:
go away until your bones are clean.
How To Eat a Poem
by Eve Merriam
Don't be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that
may run down your chin.
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.
You do not need a knife or fork or spoon
or plate or napkin or tablecloth.
For there is no core
or stem
or rind
or pit
or seed
or skin
to throw away.
I Waited All Day - Pearl Jam (Vitalogy album)
“I waited all day.
you waited all day..
but you left before sunset..
and I just wanted to tell you
the moment was beautiful.
Just wanted to dance to bad music
drive bad cars..
watch bad TV..
should have stayed for the sunset…
if not for me.”
Dissection
This rat looks like it is made of marzipan,
Soft and neatly packaged in its envelope;
I shake it free.
Fingering the damp, yellow fur, I know
That this first touch is far the worst.
There is a book about it that contains
Everything on a rat, with diagrams
Meticulous, but free from blood
Or all the yellow juices
I will have to pour away.
Now peg it out:
My pins are twisted and the board is hard
But, using force and fracturing its legs,
I manage though
And crucify my rat.
From the crutch to the throat the fur is ripped
Not neatly, not as shown in the diagrams,
But raggedly;
My hacking has revealed the body wall
As a sack that is fat with innards to be torn
By the inquisitive eye
And the hand that strips aside.
Inside this taut, elastic sack is a surprise;
Not the chaos I had thought to find,
No oozing mash; instead of that
A firmly coiled discipline
Of overlapping liver, folded gut;
A neatness that is like a small machine -
And I wonder what it is that has left this rat,
Why a month of probing could not make it go again,
What it is that has disappeared . . .
The bell has gone; it is time to go for lunch.
I fold the rat, replace it in its bag,
Wash from my hands the sweet
Smell of meat and formalin
And go and eat a meat pie afterwards.
So, for four weeks or so, I am told,
I shall continue to dissect this rat;
Like a child
Pulling apart a clock he cannot mend.
Colin Rowbotham
Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792 - 1822
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
A Birthday
BY CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.
Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.
Coal Fire
And once in some swamp-forest, these
Were trees.
Before the first fox thought to run,
These dead black chips were one
Green net to hold the sun.
Each leaf in turn was taught the right
Way to drink light;
The twigs were made to learn
How to catch flame and yet not burn;
Branch and then bough began to eat
Their diet of heat.
And so for years, six million years, or higher,
They held that fire.
And here, out of the splinters that remain,
The fire is loose again.
See how its hundred hands reach here and there,
Finger the air;
Then, growing bolder, twisting free,
It fastens on the remnants of the tree
And, one by one,
Consumes them; mounts beyond them; leaps; is done;
And goes back to the sun.
Louis Untermeyer
Poem About Writing a Poem - Eric Finney
‘Write a poem,’ she says
‘About anything you like.’
You can practically feel the class all thinking,
‘On your blooming bike!’
A poem! I’ll tell you one thing:
Mine’s not going to rhyme.
A poem between now and playtime!
There’s not the time.
In half an hour she’ll say,
‘Have you done? Hand papers in
And go out.’
I mean, does she have the slightest idea
What writing a poem’s about?
I mean, it’s agony:
It’s scribbling thoughts
And looking for rhymes
And ways to end and begin;
And giving it up in total despair –
‘I’m chucking it in the bin.’
But tomorrow it pulls you back again,
And hey, a bit of it clicks!
And you sweat with the words
But it’s hopeless again
And it sticks.
And you put it away for ever …
But it nags away in the back of your head
And the bits of it buzz and roam,
And maybe- about a century later –
You’ve got a kind of poem
PIGTAIL
When all the women in the transport
had their heads shaved
four workmen with brooms made of birch twigs
swept up
and gathered up the hair
Behind clean glass
the stiff hair lies
of those suffocated in gas chambers
there are pins and side combs
in this hair
The hair is not shot through with light
is not parted by the breeze
is not touched by any hand
or rain or lips
In huge chests
clouds of dry hair
of those suffocated and a faded plait
a pigtail with a ribbon
pulled at school
by naughty boys.
Tadeusz Różewicz
The Museum. Auschwitz 1948
Vegetarians, Roger Mcgough
Vegetarians are cruel, unthinking people.
Everybody knows that a carrot screams when grated.
That a peach bleeds when torn apart.
Do you believe an orange insensitive
to thumbs gouging out its flesh?
That tomatoes spill their brains painlessly?
Potatoes, skinned alive and boiled,
the soil’s little lobsters.
Don’t tell me it doesn’t hurt
when peas are ripped from the scrotum,
the hide flayed off sprouts,
cabbage shredded, onions beheaded.
Throw in the trowel
and lay down the hoe.
Mow no more
Let my people go!
Rain - Hone Tuwhare
I can hear you making
small holes in the silence
rain
If I were deaf
the pores of my skin
would open to you
and shut
And I should know you
by the lick of you
if I were blind:
the steady drum-roll
sound you make
when the wind drops
the something
special smell of you
when the sun cakes
the ground
But if I should not
hear
smell or feel or see you
You would still
define me
disperse me
wash over me
rain
JABBERWOCKY
Lewis Carroll
(from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
High Flight
John Gillespie Magee, Jr
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew --
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
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