Speculum And Spectroscope Poem by Brian Taylor

Wash the bones of the dead
to the white of ivory.
Light a penny candle from a star.
From St Edmund's Speculum,
hair shirt and iron corset,
how have we come this far?

Once Principals were Divines
and rounded off their names,
to show the formal structure of their minds,
with MA or DD.
Nowadays (the world must be to blame) ,
Principals have given up Divinity.
St Michael's Spectroscope reveals
three Christian saints in one.
His surname, though it seems to stand alone,
is propped up by comfortable straight-jackets
of thirty-two letters, six full stops (oh, heresy!)
four commas, , , , and a pair of (brackets) .
MA (B.Sc. Manc., D.Phil. Sussex) , FRS, C.Chem., FRSC

In place of a Footstool
of the Living God preaching
Divine Symmetry,
we have a Chair
of the Professor teaching
Inorganic Chemistry.
Avows the Confessor,
'Seek ye Life more abundant.'
Hisses the Professor,
'Seek ye cyanates and thyocyanates! '
'Consider the behaviour of man, '
the Moralist bemoans.
'Consider the behaviour of inorganic compounds, '
the Professor intones.

Pass the well and through the arch
between the chapel and the bursary,
see where old Mammon steals a march,
committing daylight burglary.
Among the Hall's ancestral stones,
he sits enjoying a godless diet
of students ecological,
amidst a pile of architectural
and psychological bones.