Please Mrs Butler: The timeless school poetry collection

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Whether it’s Wordsworth recalling his schooldays in The Prelude, or Shakespeare’s Jaques describing the schoolboy ‘creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school’, poets have often written about school, whether fondly or critically, from the teacher’s or the pupil’s perspective. Here are ten of the finest poems about school and schooldays, teachers and pupils, classrooms and chalkboards. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. Parallelism: the use of the same line structure. For example, likes one and two of stanza two as well as the structures of all the odd-numbered stanzas.

Reading again as an adult I notice poems such as Slow -reader with a greater sense of empathy and the poems take me on more of a reflective journey. Goldsmith’s depiction of a genial village schoolteacher, who is viewed by the locals as a kind of demigod, is not one that has lasted, alas, into the modern age. But when Goldsmith was writing, learning and literacy were looked up to, and the man who possessed their gifts was revered: The poem is divided into three parts. The first contains a young student’s plea for her teacher to stop one of their fellow students from copying their work. Rather than provide a solution, the teacher dismisses the issue and tries to get the student to solve it themselves. Throughout, the poet uses amusing and outrageous language that is meant to entertain, especially in the teacher’s rather outlandish suggestions.

Discover more classic poetry with these poems about work, these poems about animals of all kinds, these fine devotional and religious poems, and these poems for birthday occasions. What he doesn’t like is having to go to school. The ‘cruel eye’ of the stern schoolmaster makes school anything but a pleasant experience. The boys all sit unhappily in ‘sighing and dismay’, and the schoolboy speaker sits drooping in his chair, anxious and unhappy, unable to learn …

Allan Ahlberg (5 June 1938) and Janet Ahlberg (21 October 1944 – 13 November 1994) , née Janet Hall, were a British married couple who created many children's books, including picture books that regularly appear at the top of most popular lists for public libraries. The first time I read Please Mrs. Butler was as a year 6 pupil. .it is a journey through the school day - School time, Play time, Dinner time, School time again and Home time - all from the prospective of the children. This is a light hearted, humorous verse written about playtime. I like the way it is easy to read as a verse and by adding a touch of humour to a subject all children can relate to gives added interest to the listener. There aren’t many modern or contemporary poems which recall schooldays with affection, but ‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’ does just that. Duffy paints a fond picture of her time at primary school and on the brink of adolescence, powerfully suggested by the poem’s final image of the sky breaking into a thunderstorm. I read this poem to my year 1 class during BSE and they absolutely enjoyed it. Although this poem is fairly outdated, the comical content still produced a lot of laughter from the children. Moreover, the repetitive nature of the poem engaged the children to participate in the reading of the poem.I have been reading the poems from this book over and over from my own childhood as I enjoyed them so much from a young age. Now, as a teacher, I see them for more than their entertainment value. The book is a collection of verse, all set in the school environment on familiar themes. Organised in to sections that follow the pattern of the school day (school time, play time, dinner time etc), there are nice poems of different sorts about things like supply teachers, telling tales, excuses for being late, notes and parents. There are a few different themes that one might interpret from this poem. One of the primary options is self-reliance. The teacher is unwilling to provide the student with the answers they are looking for. Instead, they are forced, in theory, to solve their own problems. Anaphora: the repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of multiple lines. For example, “Go and sit” in stanza two.

The final line is perfect as it breaks from the pattern of the two previous verses, but maintains the effective structure;

I used this poem as a tool to help the children write their own poems, as well as getting them to replace ‘Derek Drew’ for their partners name as an alliteration. Allan always dreamed of being a writer, but first he became a primary school teacher. However, nothing has been wasted. The children in his class, his daughter, his passion for football and even being a postman for a while … all have found their way into Allan’s stories and poems. She doesn’t have a suggestion; instead, she provides these humorous and desperate-sounding ideas. The student should do whatever they think, including, but not limited to, going to the roof with their books.

The lines conclude with, “But don’t ask me!” Although the teacher is the only one who has the power to do anything about these minor inconveniences, she is not willing to. This is clearly quite frustrating for the student but, very likely, not nearly as frustrating as being constantly barraged by questions and issues is for the teacher. Please Mrs. Butler’by Allan Ahlberg is a six-stanza poem that is divided into sets of four lines, known as quatrains. These quatrains follow a simple rhyme scheme of ABCB; changing end sounds from stanza to stanza. It’s also worth noting that all the odd-numbered stanzas and even-numbered stanzas follow a simple line structure. This helps keep up a steady rhythm and makes sure that the three parts of the poem are very easily distinguished from one another. This views the start of another school year in September from the schoolmaster’s perspective, rather than his pupils’. He associates the chalk and the board and the classroom with his own mortality, with each September bringing him closer to the grave – and this feeling is only made more piquant by gazing out upon all the ‘April faces’ of the young schoolchildren, who have their whole lives ahead of them.The success of the poem, and the book as a whole, is that it speaks directly, humorously and humanely to children about everyday life in a situation they know well and spend most of their lives in: school.