The poem
And now another autumn morning finds me With chalk dust on my sleeve and in my breath, Preoccupied with vague, habitual speculation On the huge inevitability of death.
Not wholly wretched, yet knowing absolutely That I shall never reacquaint myself with joy, I sniff the smell of ink and chalk and my mortality And think of when I rolled, a gormless boy,
And rollicked round the playground of my hours, And wonder when precisely tolled the bell Which summoned me from summer liberties And brought me to this chill autumnal cell
From which I gaze upon the april faces That gleam before me, like apples ranged on shelves, And yet I feel no pinch or prick of envy Nor would I have them know their sentenced selves.
With careful effort I can separate the faces, The dull, the clever, the various shapes and sizes, But in the autumn shades I find I only Brood upon death, who carries off all the prizes.
As a reflection on aging the contrast between the teacher and the pupils makes the poem remarkable but the poet does not stress that aspect; he prefers to see only that death is inevitable for the young as the aging rather than draw any spurious irony out of the teacher's consciousnees of death and the children's fresh innocence. Wonder if it was his period in the Gordon Highlanders that gave him the good Scottish word 'gormless'?