Competition: Alma Mater
Competition
Lucy Vickery
Wednesday, 14th April 2010
Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition
In Competition 2642 you were invited to submit a homage, in verse, to an educational institution. A century or so ago Balliol man Hilaire Belloc wrote with great affection:
Balliol made me, Balliol fed me,
Whatever I had she gave me again;
And the best of Balliol loved and led me.
God be with you, Balliol men.
How times have changed.
Here is Jerome Betts’s entry for this week’s competition:
Hail, Alma Mater on the Isis!
Your three long years of essay-crisis
Prepared for all I now possess —
A mortgage, debts, and constant stress!
From Trinity College, Oxford, to the University of Bootle, from Bridge Road Infants to Harvard; you lavished praise on your chosen seat of learning. Commendations to Brian Murdoch, David Silverman and Jim Hayes — and to Max Ross for a nice Thomas Hood pastiche. The winners, below, get £30. P.C. Parrish pockets the extra fiver.
Forty years ago your colours, tawny roundel, azure U,
Led the march of nightly scholars ’gainst the college-cloistered few,
Opened access for the doughty to the laurels and the bays;
Joined anew under your banner, praise we now our happiest days!
Not for them, our first alumni, court or quad’s secluded ease,
Kitchen-table, homestead students, winning honours by degrees;
And today when modern campus signals distance from the Prof,
Many more shall swell our numbers, pinch their pockets and not scoff.
Sound again, nocturnal fanfares! Scare off children, summon geek,
Back to Shakespeare, Marxist moonshine, physics under Dr Freake.
Televisual visitations, gleam until our eyeballs hurt!
May again the Test Card’s colours blur into our tutor’s shirt!
We sing, Floreat Miltona! Let your Keynesian grids expand,
Till the squares of virtual learning gain the battle for broadband,
Shirk ye not the H.E. scrimmage, credit not the ‘debt-free’ shame,
Forward therefore, O. U. scholars! Learn and live and play the game!
P.C. Parrish
At Cambridge, next to King’s and Queens’,
You’ll come upon St Catharine’s.
She was the Alexandrian saint
Who suffered serious constraint
Seventeen centuries ago,
Tied to a wheel and put on show,
She suffered torture, loss of head,
And ended sanctified, but dead.
New generations, in that knowledge,
To honour her, have made a College
Which in its classic balance sits
And winces at those Gothic bits
That bring the tourists out in scores
To King’s, which has adjacent doors.
Here, then, is peace, and, you will find,
A perfect scale with humankind.
Paul Griffin
My parents little knew of school
And even less of college,
And all the household held of books
Was Cassell’s Book of Knowledge,
A pseudo-gilt-and-leather set,
Eight handsome vols, no less,
A product of the inter-war
Inducements from the Press.
A child’s voracious thirst to know
Will fade if not supplied,
And Cassell’s, through my tender years,
Kept me well satisfied.
It was, I guess, quite simple fare,
But, had I never seen it,
What I am now I would not be.
It formed my life. I mean it.
Noel Petty
dere st custard’s, hark the reedy
skoolboy voices old boys rase
as our anthem wet and weedy
rend the air with wurds of prase.
many are the wizard wheezes
thy young heroes hav assayed —
matron’s mousetraps robbed of cheeses,
feendish snares for masters laid,
torchure enjins atom powered
bilt to jolt new bugs with pane
(tho heroes, too, sometimes hav kowered
in the shado of the kane).
any fule kno that thy klasses
all are dens of horror, viz.
maths, yet we our gin-filled glasses
gladly lift to hail thee — chiz!
Chris O’Carroll
Mrs Woolf sat in a teashop,
eating cake and drinking tea slop,
looking out at golden Oxford
where the spires caught the sun,
thinking of the great and godly
checking books out at the Bodley,
those who read and row for Oxford,
and, alas, she wasn’t one.
‘Sir Max Beerbohm slept at Merton
and I’m virtually certain
it was in the walks of Magdalen
C.S. Lewis met his God.
Lovely Oxford, I adore ye!
I’d have added to your glory.
But, alas, I was a woman
so I couldn’t. Life is odd.’
Gail White
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