This is the theme for September 2016 Write Out Loud Marsden. Given its importance for me, I invite others to provide their thoughts on such poems.

Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, inspired me throughout my education career and subsequently in informing the path for Write Out Loud.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

I know there is debate as to how political Gray intended these lines to be, yet they resonated when I first read the poem as a supposed dead loss of a secondary school pupil, and do today as I contemplate the potential neglect of half of the population if grammar schools are reintroduced more widely. The 1963 Newsom Report into secondary education in England and Wales drew similar conclusions, as its title suggests: Half our Future.

I shall post something on this in this discussion thread too: http://www.writeoutloud.net/public/newsgroupview.php?NewsThreadsID=1991

Borges’ magnificent short poem You Learn ought to be on the school curriculum. Here’s a snatch of it:

After a while you learn the subtle difference

Between holding a hand and chaining a soul,

Archers fans will wish that Rob Titchener had learned this, though will doubt that the poem’s last line applies to him:

With every good-bye you learn

I'd be interested to hear your poems on learning/education?

Julian,

Your inspiration and the site (and those who help to run it)
Is very much needed at the present day.

In the past all the ingredients of achievement and the tools of learning were there, but only for the privileged. Granted that these are more common now, but some stage - where one could `have an actual go at it`- were confined to restricted further education locations. What was needed was some means of exposing your stuff to anyone who took the trouble to look - and this is it.

I would guess that Gray`s elegy, which you quote, is (deservedly) the only poem of his which has lasted and that this fact is of some encouragement to those of us who are not exactly prolific and who find the site so valuable. We can expose ourselves to judgement. And if
only one of our poems joins the ranks of the long-lasting then it has been very well worth it.

Long may the efforts of yourself and all who run the site prosper and gain in popularity

Well thanks for that Harry. and long may you continue to add your erudition and your curiosity to these pages.

Julian, yokur lines from Gray: struggling through translation, and sound, I came across these lines in Baudelaire, sweeter in a way, later though:

maint fleur epanche a regret
son parfum doux comme un secret
dans le solitude profonde.

In one of those rare meetings I came across an extraordinary man in the Sherlock Holmes on the Embankment a year or two ago. He countered my stab at French with Gray. A student of Western Culture, he entirely mopped the floor with me and my buddies: under the planes he sang his favourite Spanish revolutionary song, quoted Virgil, argued Renaissance sculpture in Italian, measured out Shakespeare and recited his own quick verse. I should have got his email.

"Lacking the refinements of a elegant education" myself I was reminded, again, of how well we can speak, and how the best of our thinking is put forward in the vehicle of poetry, even becomes it, as you will find Lincoln's letter to the mother of five, dead in the civil war, in the American anthologies. Religious and spiritual writing almost require the weight of poetry to work.

Is this away from the point? Somewhat. But I was glad to be reminded of a poignant observation:

many a flower's sweetest perfume, to its regret, rises, intimate as a secret, in the saddest isolation.

the proper study of man is man, right?

Dom.

Dominic, wow, thank you. Je te remercie, tout ca. You quote Pope, and those two lines are etched on my memory: know thyself, presume not God to scan,
the proper study of mankind is man.

Thank you for those absolutely appropriate observations.

Executive Mansion, Washington, Nov. 21, 1864

Dear Madam,

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts, that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.

I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom. Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,

Abraham Lincoln