Hardy was a misery, Blake the furthest
mystery,
Auden was a brainbox, Thomas alcoholic,
Eliot and Kipling – sent their letters
rippling,
Emerson a clever one, Chaucer ever saucy,
Dickinson amazing, Whitman went out
traipsing,
cummings hated capitals, Owen had a war on,
Larkin was hardworking, Hughes became a
laureate,
Tennyson another one, and who was HD?
But Wallace Edgar’s Wallace
tosses Shakespeare sonnets
out into a flat cap
when t’lion et up Albert.
Plenty to laugh at int’ zoo
‘ind ‘im in his Sunday clothes too.’
I remember Owens' poem. Wow! he describes war so well, at least the ugliness of it. I'm reading a book about The Crimean war.
ReplyDeleteYou lost me on the last two stanzas, but I enjoyed the poem. I liked the weirdly bouncy rhythm. And that it rhymed. But I feel like I'm going to have to go look up 't'lion et up Albert" or I'll always wonder what it was about and fifty years from now I'll wake up sobbing, my sweat-dampened sheets clinging to me as I cry out in misery and then realize that, hey, I'm 94 years old and that's pretty good! (Also, by then the Internet will be wifi'ed straight into our brains, so simply thinking about something will immediately cause its Wikipedia page to download into your brain. Life's gonna be SWEET when I'm 94.)
ReplyDeleteLove it! My favorite poems are those I have to read twice - the first in my head and the second out loud. This does the trick.
ReplyDelete