Why I enjoy poetry anthologies

By Robbie Cheadle

I have always enjoyed reading poetry. My love started with nursery rhymes which I read repeatedly when I was a child. I had some personal favourites including The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, There was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Fly, and Who Killed Cock Robin. My enjoyment of nursery rhymes developed rather naturally into a delight in poetry.

When I was at school, we were made to learn certain poems off by heart. This was required for both English, my first language, and Afrikaans, my secondary language.

Astonishingly, some of the poems I learned impacted me so much, I can still recite them. Do you recognise these lines?

“When you hear it languishing

and hooing and cooing, and sidling through the front teeth,

the Oxford voice

or worse still

the would-be Oxford voice

you don’t even laugh any more, you can’t.”