Each day I sit in an ill-lighted room <br />To teach a boy; <br />For one hour by the clock great words and dreams <br />Are our employ. <br />We read St Agnes' Eve and that more fair <br />Eve of St Mark <br />At a small table up against the wall <br />In the half-dark. <br />I tell him all the wise things I have read <br />Concerning Keats. <br />'His earlier work is overfull of sense <br />And sensual sweets.' <br />I tell him all that comes into my mind <br />From God-knows-where, <br />Remark, 'In English poets Bertha's type <br />Is jolly rare. <br />She's a real girl that strains her eyes to read <br />And cricks her neck. <br />Now Madeline could pray all night nor feel <br />Her body's check. <br />And Bertha reads, p'rhaps the first reading girl <br />In English rhyme.' <br />It's maddening work to say what Keats has said <br />A second time. <br />The boy sits sideways with averted head. <br />His brown cheek glows. <br />I like his black eyes and his sprawling limbs <br />And his short nose. <br />He, feeling, dreads the splendour of the verse, <br />But he must learn <br />To write about it neatly and to quote <br />These lines that burn. <br />He drapes his soul in my obscuring words, <br />Makes himself fit <br />To go into a sunny world and take <br />His part in it. <br />'Examiners' point of view, you know,' say I, <br />'Is commonsense. <br />You must sift poetry before you can <br />Sift Evidence.'<br /><br />Lesbia Harford<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/lawstudent-and-coach/
