Love Letter to Your Thesis: Saddest (Runner Up)

The results are finally in! The standard of entries in this year’s competition was exceptionally high. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we did.

Ode to a Thesis

My heart aches, and a melancholic blank page pains

         My sense, as though of toluene I had drunk,

Or emptied some late lanthanides to the drains

         One year past, and Clyde-wards had sunk:

'Tis not through envy of thy literature,

         But being, too, happy in thine euphoria,

                That thou, recalcitrant opus of the scholar

                        In some offhand plot

         Of reddened ink, and pages numberless,

                Siren song of errors in full-throated ease.

O, for a tome of vintage! that hath been

         Slumber’d a long age in the deep-delved Athenaeum,

Tasting of pulp and the inkwell black,

         Prints, and rough drafts, and mournful plots!

O, my yearn for a beakerful of poly(methyl methacrylate),

         Full of the pure, the blushful polyfluorene,

                With a lack of bubbles winking on the film,

                        And saffron-stained mitts;

         Such that I might taste, and leave the world unseen,

                And with thee step away into the darkness dim:

Weighed far away, dissolved, and briefly forget

         What thou amongst page leaves hast never known,

The resonance, the dexter, and the fret

         Here, where pupils sit and hear eachother groan;

Where luminance shakes a few, sad, last silver tears,

         Where spots grow faint, and sullied and dies;

                Where but to think is to be full of hardship

                        And slovenly despair,

         Where speckles cannot keep thine vivacious eyes,

                Or new love covets thine hereafter.

Adieu! adieu! thy doleful abstract fades

         Sooner the method, as the discussions stance,

                Afore the conclusion; and now 'tis buried deep

                        Enveloped by reproach:

         Was it an apparition, or a waking trance?

                Bare is thee, thine thesis:—Do I wake or sleep?

Nicki Fairbairn