A learned poet’s mystifying mistakes

I enjoy Poetry Please, but was shouting mildly at the wireless the other day when a northern woman poet was using the whining intonation that some seem to think the proper voice in which to recite verse. So I was glad that Bernard O’Donoghue came on, with an accent formed by a childhood in Co. Cork.

His poem ‘Gerund’ was about an only child who ‘grew up in a county council cottage by the roadside’ but was allowed to go on to secondary education (as many in Ireland then did not) because of his intelligence. At school, the poem says: ‘When Joe Garvey asked/ “What part of speech is desperandum?”,/ trembling, he volunteered “a gerund”,/ and then translated “what must be despaired of”./ How did he know?’

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Ross Clark

Britain is living beyond its means

A good question, since desperandum, as in nil desperandum (a phrase in an ode by Horace), is not a gerund, but a gerundive.