I'll read one more metrical poem, a very different one.
This one is a poem that I wrote about Oxford.
I spent a couple of years at Oxford.
And I really had a very good time.
They said there are irritations that occur with any place.
Some years afterwards, I wrote my Oxford poem
and it seems sort of irritable to me.
I wrote it in heroic couplets.
They start out heroic and then they weaken and get cowardly.
But I wrote in heroic couplets because it's
the only possible way to write a poem about Oxford.
Oxford University in the 50s must
have been the only place in the world which,
when it had a poetry prize and announced it,
had the last sentence of the announcement said,
the poem need not be written in heroic couplets.
And that's pretty fantastic for now,
for the middle of the 20th century.
Unbelievable.
Well, it's a really heroic couplet place--
or it was a few years ago anyway.
This is called-- I lived in Christ Church in the Meadow
buildings, overlooking Great Meadows going down
to the river.
And all through the poem, various words
are capitalized and underlined in the manner of some
of the 18th century books--
anything that's a proper name.
Often I saw, as on my balcony, I stirred the afternoon
into my tea.
Enamelled swards descending to the Thames
called Isis here and flowers that were gems.
Cattle in herds and great, senescent trees through which,
as Pope predicted, ran the breeze.
Ad sinistram where limpid Cherwell flows.
Often I saw the punts of gallant beaux
who sang like shepherds to each gentle love, quaint tales
of Trojan warriors to prove that loving maidens are rewarded
here with bastards and with pints of watered beer.
Here too I saw my countrymen at large, expending Kodachrome
upon a barge.
From chauffeured car or touring omnibus,
they leered at me calling me them, not us.
A jutting woman came to me and said, your Highness,
can those big white geese be fed?
Yankee, go home, I snarled.
[LAUGHTER]
Of course the swans, as the bard puts it, are reserved for Dons.
She fainted then, beside two Christ Church
porters who cast her as I told them on the waters.
[LAUGHTER]
My one and only heroic couplet.