There was a time when schoolchildren could deliver poetry by heart; in her eighties, my mother recited verse she had learned at school seventy years earlier. There was hardly a British home that didn’t have Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ framed and placed prominently.

Children soaked up poetry as enthusiastically as later generations soaked up the pop scene. Some verse changed society for the better: It was Christmas Day in the Workhouse that caused middle-class Victorians to check their deeply flawed sanctimonious attitudes towards the poor.  

THE FUTILITY OF WAR

Poetry made us realise the futility of war: Surely the most poignant that of Ireland’s Pat McGill and England’s Wilfred Owen.

Untold thousands of boys inspired by John Masefield’s Sea Fever took up a seagoing career: I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by   …   ‘.

British islanders, stirred passionately by the poetry of Robert Service and Robert Louis Stevenson, opted for adventure abroad. Yet in a literature form dominated by men, it was a woman, Elizabeth Browning, whose How Do I Love Thee? is still voted the most romantic verse ever penned.

Can anyone read Thomas Hardy without aching for what was once England, peruse Rupert Brookes, The Soldier, without weeping for that sceptred isle; scan the verse of A. E. Houseman and not lament those blue remembered hills?

TWO HEARTS WITH ONE BEAT

The world is much poorer without its poets and their insightful words of deep wisdom. Some were one-liners but like a picture, they told more than a thousand words.

How better to express one’s deepest love for another, in my case Valda: Zwei seelen und ein gedanke, zwei hertzen und ein schlag (Two souls with one thought, two hearts with one beat).

I recall a line in a Jack London book; it was anonymous but its simplicity never abandoned me: ‘In a world of women I searched, and then I found you.’ It says it all really, doesn’t it?

ELTON JOHN

Talking of the anonymous these souls lost in obscurity live on in the words of comfort they bequeathed us. I doubt if there is any better funereal recitation than I Did Not Die. Its poignancy reaches into one’s deepest soul thoughts; no other art form can do that.

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Not being too sure about that I asked the same question of my son. He replied without hesitating: “Film music.” Poetry expressed as music will also live on.

Anyone who has hummed Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair knows that much. Donovan’s Universal Soldier, the wistful laments of balladeer Charlie Landsborough and so much more that is sheer poetry. I can sing along to that. PLEASE SHARE OUR STORIES

THE DOVETAILS HOTEL A charming romantic and risqué comedy that dares to discover the taboo pleasures of a ménage a trois relationship. Michael Walsh award-winning novelist amusingly reveals the amorous love lives of Gareth and his two attractive lady friends who are happy to share more than just friendship with the debonair novelist. CLICK LINK TO BOOK  https://feji.us/fkd67l

THE ENIGMA OF TIFFANY Michael Walsh Award-Winning Writer. The elegant and glamorous Tiffany is a rich widow with a shady and shocking past when she meets Gareth, Leonara and Felicity holidaying on the Spanish Riviera. But who is Tiffany and Pegasus her gay partner? A romantic comedy with an ending that has you reaching for your Kleenex.   A reader writes, ‘I thoroughly enjoyed it.’ There is girl talk, excitement, revelations, dilemmas, compromises, romance, and pathos. LINK TO BOOK https://feji.us/i3410s