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This Plunket Medal

With a Few Notes on an Historical Character

This Plunket Medal business has been done to death. What we need is something fresh, something tersely original. The worthy Chairman of the Debating Society assures us that the trophy was intended to be given for excellence in recitation. So be it—I would hate to think it were otherwise. But what best lends itself to recitation is verse. So in all humility I would suggest that the following simple rules should guide the conduct of the contest in future.

(1)	All recitations shall be in verse.
(2)	No recitation shall exceed twenty-five lines in length.
(3)	All recitations shall be original.
(4)	No recitation shall be monotonous.

To prove the practicability of this scheme I submit a specimen of what seems to me to be the ideal thing for a contest, a composition on a personage not altogether unknown in this seat of learning, but whose initials only I have used, in order to conceal his identity. Observe the originality and brevity of the composition, and note how a varied metre avoids monotony. It is simple and yet eloquent; it is full of a tender delicacy, and yet it is not without its sterner interludes of tragedy and of passion.

What! You never have heard of J.C.B.?
Oh, foolish youth and frail!
For he is a man both grand and great,
With heaps of learning within his pate,
Learning compounded of battle and date
Unknown to the bourgeoisie.

Wise is the man, and most sarcastic,
And sometimes verses, weird,
fantastic, Issue out of his cortex plastic,
With majesty imbued.
There he sits in his cell monastic,
Sending Profwards comments drastic
On history papers crude.

"Oh, J.C.B.! oh, J.C.B.!" a woeful maiden cries,
"How could you be so cruel to me
And call my answers lies?
For all I knew was written there
In hieroglyphics blue,
But now that margin, once so bare,
Is crimsoned o'er by you!"

But never a word says J.C.B.
To the foolish female's wiles,
But down to the depths of his cell goes he
And smiles sardonic smiles.

This, of course, is merely a suggestion, and let me emphasise that it is written entirely

—Without Prejudice.