Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, APOLOGIA, by JOHN COWPER POWYS


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

APOLOGIA, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: These bitter stammered rhymes
Last Line: To belong to the infinite stream.
Subject(s): Children; Earth; Life; Rhyme; Childhood; World


These bitter stammered rhymes,
Tuneless so many times,
And always rent and torn,
What have they they can plead
At the bar of the critic-breed,
That to life they should be born?

Nothing but this, that they,
In their own drifting way,
Express the soul that bred 'em.
And it is something if verse,
For many a priest does worse,
Takes a man and his style to wed 'em.

In every child of earth
There runs thro' his head from birth
A broken stammered tune,
The fairy-tale of his days;
And 'tis much, if, with little to praise,
He can mutter this to the moon.

For the little things he spied at,
And the little things he cried at,
Take a far-flung wistful gleam,
And seem as they drift on the mood
Of his verse, however crude,
To belong to the infinite stream.





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