Up the pole

Now spring has come to Oxfordshire And sunshine to the city There's people in the parks, because The parks are looking pretty.

The uni' owns the land along The lazy River C, That gives oxygenated bliss To God, and man, and me.

The flowers by the entrance were All yellow and vermillion - I passed them on the way towards The cricketing pavilion.

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So, as I lay upon the grass And stretched, and yawned, at ease, A flagpole that's without a flag Was tickled by a breeze.

It swayed a bit, as flagpoles do, And then its flagless twine Was blown as well, but: cord and steel, They didn't sway in time.

"Clank, clank," the cord and flagpole said, And then said "clank" again, Continuing for half an hour In much a similar vein.

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On hearing this percussive beat My mind began to yield To thoughts of love, and life, and stuff, And sitting in a field.

I stopped to wonder what within A sound so coarse and rough Inspired me to poetry And sim'lar versy stuff.

So: like a model scientist (I know you're bound to laugh) I tape-recorded half an hour To plot it on a graph.

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From left to right is "time elapsed;" The height of points mean "noise." (That dropout's where my dictophone Was kicked around by boys.)

Each point up there's a single hit, A blow of rope on steel - It's really silent in-between, But... graphs are hardly real!

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So: second after second came A sound, a pause, a sound: The wind picked up, the rope was LOUD; Becalmed, it quietened down.

And in-between: those little blips? They're from the pole itself. It creaked and groaned like ship floorboards Wrecked on the coastal shelf.

They're not some other passing sound, Like birds, or dogs, or things: I cut out all the rubbish Words- Worth would have just left in.

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So: does the mournful clang recall The Marie Celeste's bell? Or echoed beats of tribal drums? From this plot I can't tell.

You trace the gradient of the graph: A fall, a rise, a fall But of poetic content, lines Don't seem to speak at all.

The soul's not in the median, The s.d. or the mean, Or even in the chi-squared fit, But - somewhere in between!

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And so I gave up plotting graphs - The straight lines are a drag - My new job starts on Monday Week: Erecting poles for flags.