of the poem ’ s design is its high point , distinctly more interesting than either the obsequious content or the quality of the verse .
14 . Book ( Anonymous ), p . 54 This book-shaped composition is a praise poem addressed to King James VI & I . It describes how the country ’ s major academic institutions – Oxford and Cambridge – celebrated his accession to the throne . The arms for both universities feature books , which may have inspired the form of this poem . King James himself was something of a scholar , author not only of the Daemonologie that would help to inspire Shakespeare ’ s Macbeth but also of such works as ΒΑΣΙΛΙΚΟΝ ΔΩΡΟΝ , a popular work on royal government , and a treatise ( in Scots ) on Scottish poetry . A book seems a particularly apt gift for him .
As mentioned above , it is unclear in what order the verses around the frame of this book are meant to be read . We have chosen the current order because it seems to move logically from a discussion of gifts in general to an enumeration of the specific gifts given by Oxford and Cambridge . This order also causes the poem to begin and end with a reference to Minerva , goddess of wisdom . The framing verses on left and right are elegiac couplets ; the spine has two hexameters ; and the verses on the pages of the book are Adoneans ( which consist of the last two feet of a hexameter line used on their own ).
15 . Heart ( Anonymous ), p . 58 These dactylic verses ( note that the poem starts with a whole , even if contrived , hexameter and ends with a single dactyl ) offer the new king a ‘ heart of love ’. Largely straightforward in expression , the poem shares one or two ideas with no . 16 : note τοῦ κόσμου ... ὁ κόσμος ( l . 9 & inside the altar in 16 ) and παῖδες τῆς φιλίης , here ( l . 5 ) construed with δοτῆρες , (‘ children are the givers of friendship ’), but in no . 16 taken together as the somewhat stranger ‘ children of friendship ’. It ’ s almost as if a teacher required the boys to write the poems and gave them a list of possible phrases to include , or perhaps the same person wrote both poems .
16 . Altar ( Anonymous ), p . 60 This altar announces itself in the first line : ‘ Βωμὸς ἐγώ .’ This prosopopoeia is reminiscent of the ‘ speaking objects ’ in classical poetry – for instance ,
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