‘Language’

 

A fairly well-known poet told me that once when he went to talk to a class of English pupils their teacher took him aside first and said ‘We don’t like poems with language in them.’ By ‘Language’ this moron, this disgrace to his profession, this stunter of children’s minds, probably meant ‘Rude words’; ‘Swear words’: good old English words like fuck and shit and cunt. Short of summary execution it is difficult to know what to do with ‘teachers’ like that, but one approach might be to nod in agreement and then — poets being by definition experts in the use of words — read the pupils a selection of ‘rude’ poems to which the teacher could not reasonably object. Poems such as the following, usually attributed to John Wilmot, Lord Rochester:

 

Base metal hanger by your master's thigh!
Eternal shame to all prick's heraldry,
Hide thy despisèd head and do not dare
To peep, no not so much as take the air
But through a button-hole; but pine and die
Confined within the codpiece monastery.
The little childish boy that hardly knows
The way through which his urine flows,
Touched by my mistress her magnetic hand
His little needle presently will stand.
Did she not raise thy drooping head on high
As it lay nodding on her wanton thigh?
Did she not clap her legs about my back,
Her porthole open? Damned prick, what is 't you lack?
Henceforth stand stiff and gain your credit lost,
Or I'll ne'er draw thee, but against a post.

 

That’s all right isn’t it, teacher? No ‘Language’ there, is there?