The School Of Agriculture

I gazed with wild prophetic eye Into the future vast and dim: I saw the University Indulge its last and strangest whim: It did away with Mods and Greats, Its other Schools abolished all: And simply made its candidates Read Science Agricultural.

They learnt to hoe: they learnt to plough: To delve and dig was all their joy: But O in ways we know not now Those candidates we did employ: No more, accepting of a bribe To take these persons off our hands, We sent them off, a studious tribe, To distant climes and foreign lands.

We did not then examine in The subjects which we could not teach To those who Honours aimed to win We taught their subjects, all and each We made the Professoriate Take from its Professorial shelf Authorities of ancient date, And teach the candidates itself

My scanty page could ne'er contain Of works the long and learned list By which it was their plan to train The sucking agriculturist: In brief, the arts of tilling land Sufficiently imparted were By great Professor Ellis, and By great Professor Bywater.

One taught th' aspiring candidate In Hesiod each alternate day: One showed him how the crops rotate From Cato De Re Rustica: The bee that in our bonnets lurks He taught to yield its honied store By reading Columella's works And also Virgil (Georgic Four).

Yet not by Theory alone Did learning train the student mind-- Its exercise was carried on In places properly assigned: From toil by weather undeterred In winter wild or burning June, The precepts in the morning heard They practised in the afternoon.

The Colleges, whose grassy plots Are now resorts of vicious ease, Were then laid out in little lots, With useful beans and early peas: Each merely ornamental sod They dug with spades and hoed with hoes: The wilderness in every quad Was made to blossom as the rose.

The gardens too, with cereals decked, Where tennis-courts no longer were, Showed Agriculture's due effect Upon the student's character: No more by practices beguiled Which Virtue with displeasure notes, No longer dissolute and wild, He sowed domesticated oats.

It was indeed a blissful state: For Convocation's high decree Dubbed the successful candidate Magister Agriculturae: And if he failed, his vows denied, The world observed without surprise That those who learnt the plough to guide Were objects of its exercise!