The Poem
Civilized Man is a 3,000 line Latin verse poem that gives proper advice on a wide range of social situations the typical medieval person may encounter in day to day life.
Examples include:
- 'If you wish to belch, remember to look up to the ceiling.'
- 'Do not attack your enemy while he is squatting to defecate.'
- 'If there is something you do not want people to know, do not tell it to your wife.'
- 'Say thank you to your host.'
- 'Don't mount your horse in the hall.'
- 'If visitors had already eaten, give them drink anyway.'
- 'Loosen your reins when riding over a bridge.'
- 'Receive gifts from great men with gratitude.'
- 'If you are a judge, be just.'
- 'Eating at the table of the rich, speak little.'
- The book ends with 'Old King Henry first gave to the uncourtly the teaching written in this book.'
Read more about this topic: Book Of The Civilized Man
Famous quotes containing the word poem:
“Every poem of value must have a residue [of language].... It cannot be exhausted because our lives are not long enough to do so. Indeed, in the greatest poetry, the residue may seem to increase as our experience increases—that is, as we become more sensitive to the particular ignitions in its language. We return to a poem not because of its symbolic [or sociological] value, but because of the waste, or subversion, or difficulty, or consolation of its provision.”
—William Logan, U.S. educator. “Condition of the Individual Talent,” The Sewanee Review, p. 93, Winter 1994.
“A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)