from How to be Topp, chapter 5, How to be Topp in English (Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle)

i have said there only one peom on the english language e.g. The Brook which chater chater as it flo my dear it is obviously a girlie just like fotherington-tomas.  However there are other peoms which creep in from time to time there is one which go

Har fleag har fleag har fleag onward

Into the er rode the 600.

There are as well lars porsena of clusium elegy in country churchyard loss of the royal george and chevy chase.  Anything to do with dafodils is also grate favourite of english masters but then nothing is beyond them they will even set burns (rabbie) who is uterly weedy.

It is farely easy to be topp in english and sometimes you may find yourself even getting interested.  If that happens of course you can always draw junctions and railway lines on your desk viz

Fragment of a Greek Tragedy (A.E. Housman)

ALCMAEON  CHORUS

Cho. O suitably-attired-in-leather-boots
Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom
Whence by what way how purposed art thou come
To this well-nightingaled vicinity?

My object in enquiring is to know.
But if you happen to be deaf and dumb
And do not understand a word I say,

Nod with your hand to signify as much.
Alc. I journeyed hither a Boeotian road.
Cho. Sailing on horseback or with feet for oars?
Alc. Plying by turns my partnership of legs.
Cho. Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus?
Alc. Mud’s sister, not himself, adorns my shoes.
Cho. To learn your name would not displease me much.
Alc. Not all that men desire do they obtain.
Cho. Might I then hear at what your presence shoots?
Alc. A shepherd’s questioned mouth informed me that –
Cho. What? for I know not yet what you will say.
Alc. Nor will you ever, if you interrupt.
Cho. Proceed, and I will hold my speechless tongue.
Alc. – this house was Eriphyla’s, no one’s else.
Cho. Nor did he shame his throat with hateful lies.
Alc. Might I then enter, passing through the door?
Cho. Go, chase into the house a lucky foot.
And, O my son, be, on the one hand, good,
And do not, on the other hand, be bad;
For that is very much the safest plan.
Alc. I go into the house with heels and speed.

CHORUS

In speculation                                             (Strophe)
I would not willingly acquire a name
For ill-digested thought,
But, after pondering much,
To this conclusion I at last have come:
Life is uncertain.
This truth I have written deep
In my reflective midriff,
On tablets not of wax.
Nor with a pen did I inscribe it there
For many reasons: Life, I say, is not
A stranger to uncertainty.
Not from the flight of omen-yelling fowls
This fact did I discover,
Nor did the Delphic tripod bark it out,
Nor yet Dodona.
Its native ingenuity sufficed
My self-taught diaphragm.

Why should I mention                                 (Antistrophe)
The Inachian daughter, loved of Zeus,
Her whom of old the gods,
More provident than kind,
Provided with four hoofs, two horns, one tail,
A gift not asked for:
And sent her forth to learn
The unfamiliar science
Of how to chew the cud?
She, therefore, all about the Argive fields,
Went cropping pale green grass and nettle-tops,
Nor did they disagree with her.
Yet, howso’er nutritious, such repasts,
I do not hanker after.
Never may Cypris for her seat select
My dappled liver!
Why should I mention lo? Why indeed?
I have no notion why.

But now does my boding heart                    (Epode)
Unhired, unaccompanied, sing
A strain not meet for the dance.
Yea, even the palace appears
To my yoke of circular eyes
(The right, nor omit I the left)
Like a slaughterhouse, so to speak,
Garnished with woolly deaths
And many shipwrecks of cows.
I therefore in a Cissian strain lament,
And to the rapid,
Loud, linen-tattering thumps upon my chest
Resounds in concert
The battering of my unlucky head.

Eriphyla: (within) O, I am smitten with a hatchet’s jaw;
And that in deed and not in word alone.
Cho. I thought I heard a sound within the house
Unlike the voice of one that jumps for joy.
Erip. He splits my skull, not in a friendly way,
Once more: he purposes to kill me dead.
Cho. I would not be reputed rash, but yet
I doubt if all be gay within the house.
Erip. O! O! another stroke! That makes the third.
He stabs me to the heart against my wish.
Cho. If that be so, thy state of health is poor;
But thine arithmetic is quite correct.

from My Ántonia, book III, Lena Lingard, chapter II

I propped my book open and stared listlessly at the page of the 'Georgics' where to-morrow's lesson began. It opened with the melancholy reflection that, in the lives of mortals, the best days are the first to flee. 'Optima dies . . . prima fugit.' I turned back to the beginning of the third book, which we had read in class that morning. 'Primus ego in patriam mecum . . . deducam Musas'; 'for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country.' Cleric had explained to us that 'patria' here meant, not a nation or even a province, but the little rural neighbourhood on the Mincio where the poet was born. This was not a boast, but a hope, at once bold and devoutly humble, that he might bring the Muse (but lately come to Italy from her cloudy Grecian mountains), not to the capital, the palatia Romana, but to his own little 'country'; to his father's fields, 'sloping down to the river and to the old beech trees with broken tops.'

Cleric said he thought Virgil, when he was dying at Brindisi, must have remembered that passage. After he had faced the bitter fact that he was to leave the 'Aeneid' unfinished, and had decreed that the great canvas, crowded with figures of gods and men, should be burned rather than survive him unperfected, then his mind must have gone back to the perfect utterance of the 'Georgics,' where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the furrow; and he must have said to himself, with the thankfulness of a good man, 'I was the first to bring the Muse into my country.'

We left the classroom quietly, conscious that we had been brushed by the wing of a great feeling, though perhaps I alone knew Cleric intimately enough to guess what that feeling was.  In the evening, as I sat staring at my book, the fervour of his voice stirred through the quantities on the page before  me. I was wondering whether that particular rocky strip of New England coast about which he had so often told me was Cleric's patria.  Before I had got far with my reading, I was disturbed by a knock. I hurried to the door and when I opened it saw a woman standing in the dark hall.

from The Child that Books Built, chapter three, The Island (Francis Spufford)

At the same time, I couldn't read quite a lot of the words in The Hobbit.  I had accelerated into reading faster than my understanding had grown.  If I press my memory for the sensation of reading the second half of the book, when I was flying through the story, I remember, simultaneous with the new liquid smoothness, a constant flicker of incomprehensibility.  There were holes in the text corresponding to the parts I couldn't understand.  Words like prophesying, rekindled and adornment had never been spoken in my hearing.  No one had ever told me aloud to behold something, and I didn't know that vessels could be cups and bowls as well as ships.  I could say these words over, and shape my mouth around their big sounds.  I could enjoy their heft in the sentences.  They were obviously the special vocabulary that was apt for the slaying of dragons and the fighting of armies: words that conjured the sound of trumpets.  But for all the meaning I obtained from them, they might as well not have been printed.  When I speeded up, and up, and my reading became fluent, it was partly because I had learned how to ignore such words efficiently.  I methodically left out chunks.  I marked them to be sorted out later, by slower and more patient mental processes; I allowed each one to brace a blank space of greater or lesser size in its sentence; I grabbed the gist, which seemed to survive even in sentences that were mostly hole; and I sped on.