Words

Words
After sixty yearsFocussing on right nowI found the two fine walkersColeridge and his friend Mr William Wordsworth, Had a brief skirmish with That other wondrous set,The dreamer Keats, the  Poetic mister ShelleyAnd the bad Lord B, Went backwards in timeThrough Swift and PopeAnd Dryden to blind MiltonIn his metronomically Agonistic anti-ParadiseTo find my friend John Donne,A love-struck island to himself,The whiff of somethingOf great meaning thusBecoming ever obvious; Like incense As the swinging starts.
Breathless, reading muchOf Elizabethan and suchI circled Shakespeare, But warily, for a long whileKeeping nervous distanceUnsure about this EverestOr maybe of my ability To climb it or find the light That so many others find,Went back a long strideBut Chaucer was too tough,Loved Spencer's Faerie QueenThen fell on Tamburlaine,From reckless Marlow and,Ah! Here it is, (I thought,)The source! that riverOf sweet scented mistsStill coiled and flowedAnd thrust and heaved And his words livedAnd in his halcyon shade I lay and took my rest awhileAnd read how ShakespeareWas perhaps Marlowe Come live with me and be my love

They or some one wrote.Although to me it mattered Only that they were.
And then in WinchesterIn the dusty- silent attic Of that antiquarian book shop Logan Pearsall-Smith's1928 Jewel of a treatise,On Reading Shakespeare,Lay opened in my handAs when something flashedBrightly in a muddy fieldAnd you stooped to pick it upAnd you were looking Into the bright sun-colours Of a diamond.
And so the good professor Opened up the door Switched on the lightsAnd there for me that wondrous treasuryOf works to brighten up my daysTo hold an explanation for my nights.Thus, in the beginning,Were his Words.

Bryan IslipApril 98