Happy Birthday, JCR!

My next great work (by great I mean 'still surviving on my computer') was the only poem I was mandated to write: the annual birthday ode to the JCR, in celebration of its founder, George Leigh Cooke. At the time, the JCR was struck with a great deal of internal political dissent concerning inter alia (see, I do Classics) the Browne Review into Higher Education. The poem was intended to remind Corpuscles of the sense of healing, love, warmth and inebriation that makes Corpus such a fine, upstanding and homely institution. It reads thus:

Happy birthday JCR

Two hundred and thirteen years ago

(Give or take a week or so)

A sacred duty one man took:

(A gentleman named George Leigh Cooke,

Mathematician, Scholar, Priest

So says his wiki page at least)

To found a college JCR

Staggering-distance from the bar.

Still it stands, but something more

Than these four walls and tea stained floor

Make up this sacred meeting-place

(Even if the moose’s face

Is sadly missing from the wall;

The finest VP of them all).

It’s not the room, the comfy chairs

Or drunkards rolling down the stairs

That makes us call this place our home,

But a spirit of its very own

A unity that we must strive

To nurture, love and keep alive.

No politics, no points of view

(Especially on that Browne review)

Should ever make us lose the sight

Of what we love; for when we fight

Ourselves, we cannot hope to face

The dangers that are commonplace.

Corpuscles, when you’re drinking tea

In that same room, then think of he

Who set it up, and raise a toast

To the common room you love the most;

To Corpus, Pelican, Cloisters, Quad,

Auditorium, the Porters’ lodge;

The honeyed walls, the leaking roof

The ‘Big Three’; Jack, Franklin and Scoof;

The Committee, the elected few,

But most of all, to all of you.

And just as did our famous George

Corpuscles, ever onwards forge!

Show the snooping OxStu hacks

Corpus stands united. Fact.