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Source: poem by William Stanton, unpublished collection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
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