I rarely invite you inside my classroom: mainly because I can’t write about the children, and that’s such an omission because every one, in their way, is a capsule gem waiting to dazzle the world.

But I can write about what I do. And if you had sat at the back of my classroom today, you would have found me striding up and down, waving my arms about in the style of the best absent minded academics, absolutely forbidding anyone to write anything which rhymed.

It is poetry week on the learning schedule. The older children had Ted Hughes’s Dog to read. Which rhymes; affably, and with the most deliciously dogged of humour.

Everyone, by the end of this week, will have begun to write their own poetry. What a breathtaking voyage of discovery that must, vitally, be.

For to deaden a human’s innate love of poetry is, to me, a mortal sin.

How many of us have written books of the stuff, charting every boyfriend or girlfriend, every rise and fall of our rollercoaster lives, in poems long and short, rhyming and rambling, narrative and non-narrative, sensical and nonsensical?

Poems are nuggets of kryptonite, incendiary moments concentrated like deep-red cherries into a thick syrupy cordial. They are concentrated life. They are the stuff of our spirits. They are life distilled into a few words.

Poets, I told the kids, gesticulating widely, choose which clothes to wear: iambic pentameter, verse or prose, four lines or two lines, one dwindling line: and then they make miracles out of the straightjackets they have chosen.

Look at my friend Pseu, I ranted affably to my charges. I met her in a blog. She actually chooses to write a poem every day.

And every day, she creates a poem which only has three lines, a little Japanese brace of five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables. Within it she creates a tiny perfect concept, delicate like a miniature lotus flower.

But can’t we make it rhyme? my little ones chorused.

NO! I exclaimed laughing, no, you most certainly cannot. For the poet begins with structure and rhythm and meter, children, and moves on to economy of expression and subtlety of words: and really, if you can manage these two, then you’ll be a man, my son.

(Or a woman, my daughter).

Rhyme is the icing on the cake. A virtuoso performance, I sermonised.

I came out at breaktime to find something to show them. Running through my head were the words: “I ‘ve found a small green dragon in the woodshed”….

I thought it was written by Charles Causley, and my friend Jan (who is a complete oracle; everyone needs one oracle in their lives) went scurrying off to track the dragon down in her beautiful bright new library.

When she had gone, Google informed me mechanically that its author was in fact Brian Patten. He wrote:

I’ve found a small dragon in the woodshed.

Think it must have come from deep inside a forest

Because it’s damp and green and leaves

Are still reflected in its eyes.

I read the whole thing to the older children, and they saw that the rhythm came from the very words, and the power came from strong, distilled imagination.

That wonderful enjambment, the lingering longing which is never spoken, but haunts the gap between the third and fourth line. If only, if only I had a dragon in my woodshed.

Meanwhile a Devil’s Advocate had settled itself comfortably at the back of my mind.

“What part does that rhyme play, then?” it demanded from its leather armchair. “In unskilled hands it is is a cudgel. But in the hand of the master, it is a conductor’s slender baton.

“Look at Alfred, Lord Tennyson.”

Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott dances onto the edge of my consciousness whenever I watch the leaves on a willow shimmer from green to white.

Willows whiten, aspens quiver,

Little breezes dusk and shiver

Thro’ the waves that run forever

By the island in the river

Flowing down to Camelot.

Four grey walls and four grey towers

Overlook a space of flowers

And the silent isle imbowers

The Lady of Shalott.

It is almost a sin to continue writing. Who can follow this?

As I thought on in the undertow of my madcap, animated day, I began to waver.

Is verse sublime because it draws us out into the middle of the lake, away from verbal expression towards what lies beneath? Are we treading a path between words and music?

And if this is the case, when a child wants to write rhyme, should we not just let them walk out on the lake, even if the results are clumsy and strangely pedantic?

My daughter has written books and books of poetry, a lot of it rhyming. Some of it is just what I have described: a rhythmic exercise on a trite theme. But as the poetry develops I begin to be startled by the occasional line.

When she first played this instrument she was pedantic and wielded a charming little cudgel. But she worries at verse like a dog at a rabbit hole, and I do believe I might be watching a metamorphosis in her rhyme. The butterfly is not out yet.

But she, and children like her, convince me that modelling clumsy verse is a stage in developing an art form which is separate from writing and apart from music. It is poetry, a land between prose and music, where a chance choice of word, or pause, or mannerism, can portray a whole subterranean landscape.

As did that metaphysical master, John Donne. While the following verse is a clarion cry, declaring war on Death itself, the undertow reveals an internal battle in the poet’s heart.

“Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,

And poppie, or charmes can make use sleepe as well

And better then thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,

And death shall be no more: death, thou shalt die.”

And confronted with all the force of one of my favourite sixteenth century poets, I have to concede.

Rhyme is part of a poet’s reasoning, as vital as meter and word: and as elemental as the very beat of our hearts.