National Poetry Day
Actually last Thursday was National Poetry Day, but too many things happen in October! Can you remember any poems you learned at school? I remember discussing with a retired primary school teacher, then in a care home, the poem ‘I wish I lived in a caravan’. I can still quote some lines from Shakespeare or other poets learned at secondary school but the one that speaks most to me now is one I learned in the equivalent of S1: Shelley’s Ozymanias of Egypt:
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 shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d 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.
Lord, help us to see ourselves in our true context, and to appreciate the things that endure as a legacy, and the things that do not