Upon Reading a Graduation Program Which Features a Clumsily-Formed Sentiment Wrongly Attributed to Shakespeare - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Upon Reading a Graduation Program Which Features

a Clumsily-Formed Sentiment Wrongly Attributed to Shakespeare

Scorn not the printed word, O thoughtful soul,
As Wordsworth 1 did not say, and do not set
An electric machine to grind through files
In search of gobbets all thinky and stuff

For Shakespeare set in iambs clean and neat
All the transcendent ideas of the good,
The beautiful, and the eternal true
Sustained in meters of steel and words of gold



Shakespeare never

                                     wobbled
all over the paper in unmetered rubbish
                                                                                                                  lines
of disconnected babble about stars and selves 2 without any citations for verification
stirred around in a sort of it-sounds-like-Shakespeare-kinda-sorta-they-won’t-care-anyway soup to be copied and pasted onto sheets of 8 1/2” by 11” fake parchment woodpulp because, like, y’know, that’s what you do for graduation ceremonies



1 Wordsworth, “Scorn not the Sonnet”
2 Possibly a misremembering of Cassius’ words to Brutus in Julius Caesar: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” If so, the quotation has been, like Caesar, assassinated.