In Praise of Poetry / What is This Life

My youngest, Sarah, is now in Form One. She’ll be twelve this year, but she’s still very much my little baby girl. This is tragic because all the cash-crazy airlines and hotels in the world, for some sinister reason, have cruelly colluded to grade any male or female twelve-year old as an adult. Anyway, we went ahead and celebrated her scholastic milestone and commercial coming of age with a low-light, low-cost dinner at a restaurant at Empire Gallery in Subang Jaya, three traffic lights away from our house. She’s all eager and excited: new school, new friends, new prefects. Her school now is just 500 metres away from home. What’s not to like. It’s completely the opposite when her father learned that he’s to go to Tiger Lane (somewhere between the tin mines and the ground-nut farms in Ipoh) for his secondary education. No dinner at fancy restaurant as far as I can remember. No dinner in fact. No restaurant in Kelantan in 1965, to be fair. He’s all apprehensive, uneasy and technically unhappy. New school, check. New friends, check. Prefects, umm, check. Only the school wasn’t 500 m away. It’s 500 km away.

Sarah came back with a bundle of books on the first day. All borrowed books, meaning I didn't have to spend even one sen on text books, a massive financial reprieve for a full-time retiree. You’ve to love this country. I chanced upon one of her English books one evening, and curiously flicked through to compare her standard of English with my Remove Class English. With the raging debates and brickbats on the state of English in the country now, my expectation was no better than that of a Liverpool win. I stopped at page 11 and read. And read again. And again, aloud. There it was, in full glory and grandeur, the perpetual poem ‘Leisure’ by W H Davies:

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

I learned this poem in Remove Class way back in 1966. But only now I can appreciate its simplicity and clarity. You get what you see. If only we could all be be as open and outright. The lines rhyme so effortlessly. Now, is Sarah’s English sub-standard or second-rate compared with her father’s Remove Class English? Honestly I’m not sure now. Every time I say ‘poyem’, she shrieks. ‘Pom’, she suggests, with slight e and swagger. She wins.

Anyway, it took me a while to memorize this poem in Kelantanese English or English Kelantanese, you choose. Mr Chan Teng Hong, the class teacher, was just happy and proud that everyone in my class could recite it by heart. I mean everyone except the class monitor. Ask any of my 1966 classmates, and he’ll tell you more.