Ode to Alpha Beta
(April 2005)
Some twenty-six I’ve found as of this day
That make their place in England’s native tongue;
In every word we utter they belong,
From start to close they always play their part.
Right from the days of Anglo-Saxon men
The symbols of society emerged,
The language that they carried, now we know,
To be the language that we speak today.
They’re found in Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Pope,
In Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, and Coleridge,
Through all the greats of English Literature,
We find the letters that are used right now.
When Martin King had said he had a dream,
When Ghandi had opposed the British rule
Their speeches had been formed from many words,
And letters then had formed the words they spoke.
Alliteration forms from letters same,
And so begins the many score and six,
As of right now t’will start the list of words,
All of them start from letters that ensue.
Byron, and Blake, and Burns- together all
Born brilliant in the Romanticism Age,
Came Coleridge, with his Ancient Mariner Rime,
Comedic Chaucer satirized his time,
Daniel Defoe, John Dryden, and John Donne
Divided they were ‘cross the wheel of time,
Elizabethan theatres brought drama to the stage,
Exemplums and the epics also came,
Folk ballads came about in Feudal times,
Frightening Frankenstein by Shelley writes,
Gray had written the churchyard elegy,
Gone now he is, but still his poem remains,
Heroic couplets come from Chaucer’s pen,
Hopkins, Hardy and Herrick write their works,
Illuminating imagery arrives
Inside the heart of all of Steinbeck’s books,
James Joyce wrote “Araby” right near our time
“John Anderson, My Jo” by Burns was made,
King James had wrote the Bible in his name,
Kubla Khan by Coleridge had been penned,
“Lines Composed Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”
Let Wordsworth share his feeling of the world,
Macbeth, Midsummer Night’s Dream, diff’rent plays
Made by the Bard himself, William Shakespeare
“Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” Raleigh wrote,
Naming reasons why life is not material,
Ode to a Grecian Urn, a Nightengale
Originated from the mind of Keats,
Poor Milton wrote his major epic blind,
Paradise Lost told of the loss of Eden
Romanticism brought about new thought,
“Rime of the Ancient Mariner”- one of those,
Shakespeare, Shelley, Sidney, Spenser, all greats,
Sonnets they wrote that we all know today,
To mice, to lice, skylarks, autumn, an urn,
To nightingales, all dedication poems,
“Ulysses”, by Lord Tennyson, was told,
Unto a journey the adventurer went,
“Virtue” showed all the needless fear of death,
Virgins were talked to through the poem of Herrick,
“When I Consider How My Light Is Spent”-
Words of John Milton always touch our heart,
“X” is a letter that is hard to use,
“X”ellent things follow other letters,
Yeats was a great poet; “The Second Coming”
Yeats wrote, and it had shown his different views,
Zeigeists have always shown the way of thought,
Zephyrs were all the winds of Chaucer’s time.
All throughout times of English Literature,
We’ve seen the letters of the English alphabet;
They make the wondrous language that we speak,
And make a poem always so much more.
So as I close my speech about their grace,
I ask for you to consider the facts:
If there were no more letters in the world,
Then what would be the words right from our mouth?
Without the vowels five we see today,
Th lngg wld thn b ll brkn p
(The language would then be all broken up)
And without all the other twenty one
E aue ou i e a oe u
(The language would still be all broken up)
And if we took away all of them now,
Then…