Mr. Courtney

Sitting in Mr. Courtney’s English class
moving my feet to that iambic beat
while  greasy Joan doth keel the pot
and snot runneth down the back of my nose.

He tells us he is not a happy man
which makes us feel embarrassed, awkward, sad
(behold the dawn in russet mantle clad)
we pretend interest in (yes) Charles Lamb.

He struck me on the face once, hit me hard.
Have at you varlet! A palpable hit!
A snide remark I made, yes that was it,
about poor Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Still, would this poem be, if not for him,
Keats, beaded bubbles winking at the brim?

Over at Desperate Poets, Brendan quotes Joyce Carol Oates:

“There’s lots of reasons that people have for not doing things. Then the cats are gone, the children move away, the marriage breaks up or somebody dies, and you’re sort of there, like, “I don’t have anything.” A lot of things that had meaning are gone, and you have to start anew. But if you read Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Ovid writes about how, if you’re reading this, I’m immortal. You see that theme in Shakespeare’s sonnets: You’re reading this, so I’m still alive. In fact, they’re not alive, they’re gone, but while they were alive, they did have that extra dimension of their lives. That is not nothing.”

When I read this I thought of the above poem “Mr.Courtney” about my high school teacher. The poem has had a number of forms but ended as a sonnet. As Joyce Carol Oates also points out (see Brendan’s intriguing post) that memories fade but if you capture that memory in a poem, a novel, a painting it gets a life ot its own.

Mr. Courtney taught us Latin and English Literature. The curriculum was tilted towards the great English authors, like Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats. he was a big Keats fan. We had to learn whole poems and passages off by heart. Some lines are permanently stuck in my head and I have inserted them in to the poem here and there. And yes, he did clatter me across the face once, he could never quite look me in the eyes after that.

The sonnet idea came from Bjorn’s verse form challenge over at dVerse to write a sonnet. I’ve chosen  an ABBA, CDDC, EFFE, GG rhyme scheme. I’ve used half rhymes here and there to add interest and tried to keep to a ten syllable line even though I haven’t always stuck to that iambic beat.