Robert Service
To buy for school a copy-book
I asked my Dad for two-pence;
He gave it with a gentle look,
Although he had but few pence.
It was then I proved myself a crook
And came a moral cropper,
I bought a penny copy-book
And blued the other copper.
I spent it on a sausage roll
Gulped down with guilt suggestion,
To the damnation of my soul
And awful indigestion.
Poor Dad! His job was hard to hold;
His mouths to feed were many;
Were he alive a million fold
I’d pay him for his penny.
Now nigh the grave I think with grief,
Though other sins are many,
I am a liar and a thief
’Cause once I stole a penny:
Yet be he pious as a friar
It is my firm believing,
That every man has been a liar
And most of us done thieving.
1.Discuss within groups your understandings of the origins and symptoms of the universal sense of guilt and sins.
2.Try to translate the last stanza of the poem into Chinese.Pay special attention to the metrical form and rhyme scheme of the poem.
Proper Names
Congo 剛果
Poland 波蘭
Ukraine 烏克蘭
Notes
1. Lord of the Flies:It is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning author William Golding about a group of British boys stuck on a deserted island who try to govern themselves, with disastrous results.Its stances on the already-controversial subjects of human nature and individual welfare versus the common goodearned it position 68 on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 1990-1999.
2. Modernism:It is modern thought, character, or practice.More specifically, the term describes themodernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associatedcultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes toWestern societyin the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
3. Romanticism:It is an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe and strengthened in reaction to theIndustrial Revolution.In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of theAge of Enlightenmentand a reaction against the scientificrationalizationof nature.It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, educationand natural history.