Over the next few weeks we shall be attempting to improve our language skills before we actually start our literature course.
The school is attempting to work at the elocution skills of all the students and to that end each person was handed the following two poems to :
1.Read personally until he / she got the gist of what the poem meant.
2.Read the poems to one self loud enough for the self to hear
3.Qs. Would a person who does not have the text and will listen to me say it only once understand the poem well ?
The Strange Wild Song
by Lewis Carroll
He thought he saw a Buffalo,
Upon the chimney piece:
He looked again, and found it was
His sister’s husband’s Niece.
‘Unless you leave this house,’ he said,
‘I’ll send for the police.’
He thought he saw a Rattlesnake
That questioned him in Greek;
He looked again, and found it was
The Middle of Next Week.
‘The one thing I regret,’ he said,
‘Is that it cannot speak.’
He thought he saw a banker’s clerk
Descending from a bus;
He looked again and found it was
A Hippopotamus.
‘If this should stay to dine,’ he said,
‘There won’t be much for us!’
He thought he saw a Kangaroo
That worked a coffee mill:
He looked again, and found it was
A vegetable Pill.
‘Were I to swallow this,’ he said,
‘I should be very ill.’
He thought he saw a Coach-and-four
That stood beside his bed;
He looked again, and found it was
A Bear without a head;
‘Poor thing,’ he said, ’poor silly thing!
It’s waiting to be fed!’
He thought he saw an Albatross
That fluttered round the lamp;
He looked again, and found it was
A Penny Postage Stamp.
‘You’d best be getting home,’ he said,
‘The nights are very damp!’
Journey of the Magi by Thomas Stern Eliott
‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
The silken girls bringing sherbet,
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel at night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This : were we led all that way for
Birth or death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
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