A Guardian of Empire
This poem is my first attempt at writing in contemporary ‘free verse’. I believe poetry written without a form of control is like music written without order, and it becomes a mess. The poem is completely unstructured with no metre or rhyme; instead, I have tried to create a readable poem by using sentence structure, punctuation, language and the natural flow of the spoken word. We must go to school somewhere, and mine was an idyllic island, of unbounded childhood joy. A bulwark of English tradition amidst the social upheaval, the anarchy, perhaps, of the ‘60s, with a progressive outlook, if one was of the Edwardian era, for it was a training ground for the Guardians of Empire. And I loved it. I was steeped in its timeless values: of fair discipline, academic excellence, and sporting prowess. Our gaggle of ancient and venerated teachers, all veterans of wars past, of Ypres and the Somme, Normandy and the Yangtze Kiang, tried to shape my impressionable mind. They did better than my