“And since he’s not here to argue his interpretation of it, I can freely give you mine, without any interruption from him,” she said with a small smile as she looked at the crowd again. A ripple of knowing laughter spread in the crowd since most of them knew Peter often brooked no argument when he had idea in his head. As the sound of laughter settled, the crowd looked back at her expectantly, more relaxed now, as compared to their earlier restlessness.

“So, anyway: let’s recall that in 1833, Tennyson wrote his first version of this poem. He would revise it much later, in 1842, for publication, to the version we now know it by,” Bette continued, casually leaning on the podium, and then paused.

“In my view, Tennyson had written the poem back in 1833 originally as an elegy to his own dear friend – a reaction, if you will, to the death of this dear friend, since it looked like Tennyson had composed the poem in the first few weeks after he’d learnt of his friend’s passing.”

“The middle of the poem goes, and I paraphrase parts of it,” Bette said, straightening up now, and looking around, and fixing some in the crowd with a long stare,

“There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas ….

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done …”

Bette paused again, and looked around the room. “Death closes all… that’s not the part Peter requested I read out, but he couldn’t have known how …(cough) … apt it is to how we should feel about what happened … (another cough) … to him.”

She blinked back tears. “The previous speakers have talked already about, to quote Tennyson, “work of noble note may yet be done …” But the rest of what I have to say is not so high-minded. Because I would now like to heed Aristotle when he wrote on Anger in his book on rhetoric.”

She swept her eyes across the audience, as if trying to fix a penetrating gaze into the soul of each person her eyes encountered, and then continued slowly, “Aristotle says an orator must create a temperament in the audience that is suitable for anger and to establish her adversaries as those to be held liable … let me repeat … to be held liable for what makes her audience angry, and at the sort of men at whom they should be rightfully angry.”