May 9, 2008

Discovery of Literature
Winston Churchill won an award in school for this poem he composed (at age 14?) in 1890:

The Influenza
By Winston Churchill

I
O how shall I its deeds recount
Or measure the untold amount
Of ills that it has done
From China’s bright celestial land
Into Arabia’s thirsty sand
It journeyed with the sun

II
O’er miles of bleak Siberia’s plains
Where Russian exiles toil in chains
It moved with noiseless tread
And as it slowly glided by
There followed it across the sky
The spirits of the dead.

III
The Ural peaks by it were scaled
And every bar and barrier failed
To turn it from its way
Slowly and surely on it came
Heralded by its awful fame
Increasing day by day

-on display in his handwriting in the Cabinet War Rooms Museum, along with a punishment log book that records a flogging he received for damaging school property!