Discovered yesterday that someone has put a poem on each door of the women’s loos at church. A different poem for each door – and for reading from the inside.
I’m not here to comment on the rights or wrongs of reading on the loo, or even any differences between men and women in this regard. (I’ll have to ask Dan to check if there’s an equivalent in the men’s loos.) But I happened to see the one with Ted Hughes‘ poem The Thought-Fox, which I know and like.
It was great to take an extra minute or so to think about something other than the session I’d come from, and I went back feeling a bit more in touch with the wider world. It reminded me of seeing poems in other public places.
The Poems on the [London] Underground are one well-known option, but there was also a set of poems on the buses in Edinburgh for a while, with one in Scots about the noises different things make, like fireworks, or snow under a sledge.
It seems like newspapers are equally publishing poems more regularly, sometimes with comments, sometimes without. So here’s to poems in public places – start your own series somewhere and see who notices!
Yes I enjoy coming across poems too….they can make one stop and think for a moment. ‘What is this world if, full of care, we have no time to stop and stare…’
I was brought up in working class district of south east London.
My schooling at West Square adjacent to the Imperial War Museum was interrupted by the outbreak of WW2. I have always been interested in literature and have composed a few poems myself,
especially when I was in RAF Hospital Ely for a year.But a poem that has stuck with me throughout my life and which I try to abide by is “Vitai Lampada” (There’s a breathless hush in the close tonight)by Sir Henry Newbolt. I shan’t quote it here it’s too long I’m sure you either know it or can look it up.