A Pleasant Discovery

I wonder how many of you remember the poems we studied at school. There were all sorts of poems. Poems about rain, rainbows, God, daffodils, Pied Piper, pirates, arithmetic, Man, children, historical places, cities, soldiers, travelers... The list is a long one.

Many of these I remember because I have kept old text books. However, my collection has one textbook missing. For many months now, I have been searching for a particular poem which happened to be in the missing textbook. Even Google failed me. A few friends vaguely remembered the poem but nobody could manage to entirely recollect it. An uncle who recalled the title informed me that the textbook did not mention the poet. That turned out to be a dead end as well. Due to the change in syllabus, the said textbook's contents are entirely different from what they were 10 years ago.

I had almost given up on the poem when suddenly, a line from it came to my mind - '...had once his integrity put to the test...' And then Google did not fail me :) But what I found hugely surprised me. Apart from changing one word in the first line of the poem, which happens to be the twenty-second line of the original poem, the syllabus setters also changed the title of the poem. No surprises here because what we studied was only the second half of the original poem under the title 'Principles Put to the Test'.