Unit 44 – A Short Poem About Leaving
Difficulty: Medium
Time: 1 minute 30 seconds
Below is a short poem by Irish poet, John Montague
No Music
I’ll tell you a sore truth, little understood
It’s harder to leave, than to be left:
To stay, to leave, both sting wrong.
You will always have me to blame,
Can dream we might have sailed on;
From absence’s rib, a warm fiction.
To tear up old love by the roots,
To trample on past affections:
There is no music for so harsh a song.
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Unit 27 – The Fascination of What’s Difficult
Difficulty: Medium/Hard
Time: 3 minutes
The Fascination of What’s Difficult
by W. B. Yeats
The fascination of what’s difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day’s war with every knave and dolt*,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt
*dolt: a stupid person
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Unit 18 – Tricky Questions on Classic Poetry
Difficulty: Hard
Time: 4 minutes 30 seconds
Below is an extract from Like Dolmens Round My Childhood…, a poem by John Montague
Like dolmens round my childhood, the old people.
Jamie MacCrystal sang to himself,
A broken song without tune, without words;
He tipped me a penny every pension day,
Fed kindly crusts to winter birds.
When he died, his cottage was robbed,
Mattress and money-box torn and searched.
Only the corpse they didn’t disturb.
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Unit 1.14 – A Poem About Death
I’m after losing the name of the poet, but if anyone knows maybe give us a shout? It’s an Irish poet from the north of Ireland.
Difficulty: Medium
Time: 4 minutes 30 seconds
A Father’s DeathÂ
It was no vast dynastic fate
when gasp by gasp my father died,
no mourners at the palace gate,
or tall bells tolling slow and wide.
We sat beside the bed; the screen
shut out the hushed, the tiptoe ward,
and now and then we both would lean
to catch what seemed a whispered word.
My mother watched her days drag by,
two score and five the married years,
yet never weakened to a cry
who was so ready with her tears.
Then, when dawn washed the polished floor
and steps and voices woke and stirred
with wheels along the corridor,
my father went without a word.
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Unit 1.4 – Irish Poetry
Difficulty: Hard
Time: 4 minutes 30 seconds
A Priceless Simplicity by Pat Ingoldsby
You sat in beside me on the bus
because you wanted to.
You talked to me with
a lovely loud open voice
which doesn’t know the meaning
of shyness or inhibition
or fear of saying the wrong thing
and many people in this world
would call you simple.
You have got free travel
because your special allowance
isn’t really very special
and nobody would ever dream
of giving you a job
unless they needed a man to
clean out a public convenience.
Everybody upstairs on the bus
heard every lovely disabled
word that you spoke
but nobody turned around to see the lovely man who was speaking them.