Uploaded October 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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ELEVENTH – MISTAKEN

I

A fatal freshness sparkle of indirect language
Or intellectual appeal blotched in places obscure
Mixed inventive ideas spiced from page to page
Creating own directional humour a form of poetic law

A wet falling autumn bedims provincial pictures
Inspiration uncomfortable imagery prompting description
Explored deeper meanings below a woven texture
Of words emotional feeling artistic creation

A poetry possessed of varied psychological appreciation
That cocky bully time forever singularly choses
Only they survive themselves as posterity’s evolution
Discarded becoming subjects which an audience loses

Now devoid of those undisciplined bands of emotion
Neither preventing nor altering your poetic views


II

Verse the product of a strict poetic professionalism
With trenchant thought so evenly dispersed
Exhibits refining smooth style of traditionalism
Moderns approaches including lazy free verse

Strained feelings of a completeness compact style
A depth a confidence of individual modality
Painting that powerful verbal picture which often smiles
Then grins and smirks as a wide pleasing vocabulary

Of subjects’ divergence to exist throughout your collection
Incorporating some greatness of literary reward
Abstruseness placed obscuring some word confusion
As the calendar of hedges sniffs sighs through Oxford

So many answers yet the questions few
That “tree that walked had nowhere to walk to”!


JF Harrogate September 1973