| General Poetry
posted April 17, 2025 |
A rhymed poem in pentameter
Chastleton
I chanced one day to be at Chastleton,
a manse long buried in the Cotswold Hills,
a Jacobean home of some repute
built on profits from the woollen mills
by Jones, a man of means but little note,
who aimed to magnify his social worth
and fabricate a grander ancestry
than he could justly claim by right of birth.
Four hundred years have seen his dreams dispersed
by sons who squandered wealth and frittered life
while wives and mothers as its chatelaines
defended Chastleton through years of strife.
Its book hoard holds a store on time-warped shelves
that hint of olden days now lost in gloom.
An earthy oaken smell of ancient books
pervades the stillness of this lead-lit room,
and here there stands a book of bundled scraps,
its title tooled in gold on crimson ground,
a commonplace of treasured memories
collected over time, and calfskin bound;
old recipes for syllabubs and stews,
some hotch-potch gallimaufries, galantines;
the quantities of cloves and peppercorns
and figs and cinnamon when mulling wines;
forget-me-nots forgotten, lines of verse
inscribed by valentines and paramours,
miscellanies of ribboned memories,
mock fights with shuttlecocks and battledores;
a book of wistful echoes from the past,
recalling redolence of posied flowers,
and croquet games played out on summer lawns,
and dalliance in honeysuckled bowers.
At length, I took my leave of Chastelton,
and with it, memories of bygone days,
my own miscellany that I hold dear
of quieter times and long forgotten ways.
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