e a m harris

Poetry about …

I’ve been watching the fencing part of the Olympic Women’s Modern Pentathlon. It occurred to me to see if the wonderful World Wide Web has any poems about fencing.

Of course it does. I found several, most not really worth reading, though I liked ‘Fencing: A Poem’ on the blog Tower Review. It contains a good many technical words, most of which I don’t understand, but which add to the mood of professionalism.

Of course ‘fencing’ has another meaning and thinking of this reminded me of ‘The Mending Wall‘ by one of my favourite poets, Robert Frost, in which there is the famous line about good fencing making good neighbours. Mixing the two meanings up could have some interesting neighbourly results.

A google of ‘pentathlon’ didn’t produce much but did take me to website Toto Poetry: A Poetry Dictionary, which has some very modern examples.

Finally, in honour of this summer’s weather, I googled for poems about rain – and was inundated. Quite a number of the poems were in praise of the stuff. An example is Vikram Pratap Singh’s ‘Rain, Rain, Rain’ which starts:

Rain, Rain, Rain, come again and again,

Looking at how green my garden is this year, I don’t completely disagree.