It's National Poetry Day today
(In case you didn't know it.)
It set me pondering what
it takes
To be a successful poet.
A Wordsworth, say, or Milton
Or a Percy Bysshe Shelley
Whose words can raise the spirits high
Or turn your legs to jelly.
A poet needs a way with words
And a sense of rhyme and rhythm
A brain like a Thesaurus
Which he always carries with'him (!!!)
He needs
a sixth - or seventh - sense,
And to pay it full attention -
An ability to see the world
In a completely new dimension.
Thus, when Keats looked out of his window
"Mellow fruitfulness" he saw -
Where the rest of us saw falling leaves
Littering the lawn.
When Shakespeare met a pretty girl
It was cue another sonnet -
(He always had an eye, our Will,
For the face beneath the bonnet...)
Battlefields and killer gas -
No
subject for a poem?
We'd know nothing of the horrors
But for the pen of Wilfred Owen.
So many there are to choose from
I'll let you do the picking
Let's hear it for the poets
Long-time dead - or
live and kicking!
PS
Mr B absolutely insisted that I had to include his own favourite verse in today's blog, for which I can only apologise
in advance. It goes thus:
"Little birdie, flies so high,
Drops its luggage as it goes by.
Farmer stops and
wipes his eye,
"Damn good thing that cows can't fly!"
I call it "poetry in motions"....