Day two of MoP

Marvels of Shakespeare and Dickens

I often think of Shakespeare,  

And Charles Dickens too,

Writing by the candlelight,

Through the silence of the night,

The scribbles of their handwriting,

Words soon turned to lines,

The lines that lined those page,

Are the pages I loved even as I age.

I marble at their patience,

As they turned the page,

The hours and hours of rewrites,

No computer to make mistakes come right.

No automatic counters to indicate the page,

No go to button to take you back and forwards again.

No delete button to hit when Dickens made mistakes,

My mind boggles at the days their rewrites had to take.  

No spell or grammar checkers,

As they wrote their pages,

The small errors waited for proof reads,

Not the constant edits that suit me to a tee.

There was no backspace, insert or delete,

Only rewrite after rewrite,

Until the manuscripts became complete,

Yes I marvel at the Shakespeare and his many feats,

Writing without a keyboard,

Seems unimaginable to me,

Not mention all the library trips,

I once took to research bit by bit.  

As I sit here I can only marble,

At the patience a manuscript once took.

As the hit each key producing during January,

Writing daily poems, through this month of poetry.

Debbie Chilton © Copyright 2014