Listening time: under 4 minutes.  This delightful poem was written by a great uncle on our mother’s side and reached me in a home-printed collection of his verse, which I inherited from her. I remember he was said to have written a sonnet to his wife to mark each decade they spent together.  A few of his poems, including this one, I learned effortlessly by heart – not because it is effortless for me to learn poems, only some seem to have a cadence which lends itself to a faster imprimatur on the tablets of the mind.

I like how Bill takes a line of Latin of the standard school primer type – Caesar’s statement that Gaul was divided into three parts – and runs with it in an entirely different direction.  Gaul may be in three parts, but humanity, just two.  Here’s why…

This I have learned

And now know it for true;

All Gaul is in three parts,

Mankind but two …

Ah, the alchemy!   Hope you enjoy our recitation.  And feel free to see, or hear, others in the Poems for my Family series.

Source: poem by William Stanton, unpublished collection

Photo credit: RoyBuri at pixabay