Inspiration

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Neville Briggs
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Inspiration

Post by Neville Briggs » Sun Jun 07, 2015 4:28 pm

It's quiet here so I'll regale you with a yarn about how I became entranced with poetry.

In High School we did several poems in the English class,

The Man from Ironbark ,The Old Bush School, My Country, The Lights of Cobb & Co., Bell Birds, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

None of them stirred much interest in me. The teacher was uninspiring. When we did The Man from Ironbark, he was only interested in sneering at us boys as resembling Banjo's " gilded youths ". We paid him back by yelling the lines" murder BLOODY murder " , bloody in those days was still a rude word.
For the Old Bush School I only learnt what was meant by " agricultural letters " . The Rime of the Ancient Mariner seemed too long.

However I found in the school library a classic book, Montague James' Collected Ghost Stories. One of James' marvellous and very famous ghost stories is called Casting the Runes and in it there is a scene where the victim of a witchcraft spell gets off the train and heads home along a bush track at evening where he is followed by a demonic killer. As James relates the scene he includes these lines from The Ancient Mariner,
Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

Wonderful ! the scene came alive for me because with those few words, I could really feel the chill of the poor victim, the loneliness of the situation and the menace of the "follower " much better than just the prose description.

From that day on I loved poetry. I wanted to learn how to write but didn't seem to get any opportunity until much later, to try and write something that almost resembles poetry. Still so much to learn.
Neville
" Prose is description, poetry is presence " Les Murray.

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