FriendBurst Blog

This was composed for the CPC Pick-Apart poetry challenge, from words in two excerpted stanzas from a poem by Adelaide Crapsey, who also invented the Cinquain.  The two original  poems follow my Pic n Poem.

THE PROPERLY SCHOLARLY ATTITUDE

The poet pursues his beautiful theme;
The preacher his golden beatitude ;
And I run after a vanishing dream —
The glittering , will-o’-the-wispish gleam
Of the properly scholarly attitude—
The highly desirable, the very advisable,
The hardly acquirable, properly scholarly attitude.

I work and I work till I nearly am dead,
And could say what the watchman said—that I could!
But still, with a sigh and a shake of the head,
“You don’t understand,” it is ruthlessly said,
“The properly scholarly attitude—
The aye to be sought for, wrought for and fought for,
The ne’er to be caught for, properly scholarly attitude—”