We all of us have sneaked a look Beneath the fly-sheet of a book, And fingered off her jacket, bared her boards – Within, she’s nothing but a prude, Her marbled end-sheets firmly glued, Her bindings taut and frayless in their cords. Her underwear is stiff and plain – Her paper blouse must block the stain Of endless greasy paws and sweaty hordes. But she is flimsy in her gown, It tears and creases, lets her down, As grasping, eager hands make careless wards – The better writ, the more she’s read Until her spine is cracked for dead – So dogs shall ear all good books, save the Lord’s. And worse, the paperbacks ! Those dames Who proudly bare their racy names Across their breasts, like penny-dreadful broads – Yet she too welcomes ev’ry leer, Her first of many lovers here Who gorge all words she joyously affords – Though she’s still crisp and virgin-white, Her pages quite uncut and tight, That readers must tease open with their swords.
Like me cos you like me, Not because they told you what to, Not because they told you not to, Not because you think you’ve got to, Like me just because you do.
Love me shrug me spike me, However much they say you must, Your own desire, I’m sure you’ve sussed, Is all the taste that you can trust – The others haven’t got a clue !
The world is laid before you – There’s plenty who will tell what’s great, And who to love and who to hate, But never can themselves create – But hey, we needn’t mind them.
So snub me if I bore you, Don’t waste your time or waste your thoughts On fluff and fads and p’raps-I-oughts, But seek out diamonds from the quartz, Wherever you may find them.
This walk of the cemet’ry was opened just a decade back, With headstones still as sharp as on the day they left the chisel, Looking like they need to soften with a century of drizzle – Alabaster white and granite red and marble black, With hearts, and stars, and open books, and roses marking losses – Many doves and cherubs, fewer angels, hardly any crosses. A dozen diff’rent fonts are used, a hundred quoted lines – And honestly, the sculptor’s task is difficult enough – To craft them sombre, yes, yet touching, dignified, yet full of love. So even here, there’s fashion – we’re so human in our shrines, To leave behind a memory and not forgotten bones. It’s strange to think that this may be a golden age of grieving stones.
Once-a-time, when castles wore a crown of battlements, Their merlons hid the archers in the toothy parapet – And when the peasantry came by to pay their serf-and-chattel-rents, It wasn’t solid walls that awed them, but the holes that made a net. If only they had known how they were more for show and ostentation, Arrow slits too small to use, and windows big and weak – A single siege would give the lie to strength in crenellation But who would dare declare their home as battle-less and meek ? So castle-style continued long past castles were of any use, As if a Henry Tudor were no diff’rent from a Robert Bruce.
To be clear, battlements are very effective when their big enough, but by the time of Bodiam (1385) and Herstmonceux (1441) things were on the slide.
The Illinois by Frank Wright, king of the wangers.
The High Cost of High-Rise
Okay, I’ll admit it – The expertise to scrape the sky, To build a hundred storeys high, The maths we truly understand, The engineering we command, To know the stresses held in steel, To take such plans and make them real… Okay, I’ll admit it, It’s a pretty bloody big amazing deal.
But just because we can, That doesn’t mean we always should, That competence is only good – That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care, That towers often overbear, That carbon cost and energy To work the lifts is never free – So just because we can It doesn’t mean we have to boast so cleverly.
detail from The Bower Meadow by Dante Rossetti, Apple Blossoms by John Millais, Hylas & The Nymphs by John Waterhouse, Laus Veneris by Edward Burne-Jones and The School of Nature by William Holman-Hunt
The Clone of Beauty
So why did the Pre-Raphaelites have just the single face to paint ? Did they all maybe share a model, or ideal, or a joke ? Or were they merely moral allegories, underneath the quaint, The playthings of a puritanic club of touched and airy folk ? Their lounging nymphs of languid myth are diaphanous deities, Sometimes naked, always perfect, from Pompeii to Camelot – But rousing such lacklustre lust, or any spontaneities, These strangely-sexless sextuplets are gazed upon to be forgot.
These muses with the single face, And even fewer flickers of emotion in their artful grace, Demanding our devotion as they pose from Albion to Thrace. Androgynous, without a trace of cleavage, Under wafting folds of lace, But then again, their cold embrace has little use for heavage. At least their hair is big and wild, Those flowing waves and ringlets piled in unexpected verve, Quite out of place around a mask so English in reserve. This Sisterhood of sylvan sylphs – In pastels, spotless-clean and bright, All bathed within a golden light – Are quite the finer sort of elves, Perhaps the fairest of the fay, Just waiting for a errant knight or shepherd boy to pass their way.
Or maybe just ourselves, The gawpers in the gallery – The hoi-polloi who shrug and stare, And wonder why they have to share A single personality.
I wrote this some years ago but dug it out after visiting the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. I had always assumed that the painters made all the faces the same in search of an shared ideal of beauty, but I now suspect that the similarities were in the flesh rather than the paint – the women they chose as models already looked alike. They also shared their models around, in every sense, and I don’t think these women did any modelling for more establishment artists. That said, they don’t seem to have gone out of their way to show much nuance.
Now, we just need a good investigation about the male models they used…
You’re filling the halls from the gods to the stalls, You’re shaking the walls with your blast – You cry your encores as you cheer yourselves hoarse For the grand tour de force of the cast. And how they deserve all the plaudits you serve, For they are the verve of the play; But spare just a few for their hard-working crew, For we perform too, in our way.
Impressionist painters in poverty On canvasses lacking in threads, Glamorous silent-screen starlets, And bereted and bearded reds, Scientists seeking-out secrets, And dare-devils pushing their luck – They died too soon and died too young, When fortunes came unstuck. In days before the drugs did for, Disease was the way to go – Consumption, of course – or else it’s the pox – Or the needs of the narrative flow. Heroines, gothic or chivalrous, In novels antique or sublime – They’re dying too young from the loin or the lung, Yet they’re dying precisely on time.
The lights going on and off…and on…and off……and on………and off………
Turner Churners
The critics will faun it, the Mail just loathes – The public’s not stupid, it’s in on the deal – We’ve always known it’s the emperor’s clothes, It’s only the artists who think it’s for real. And all’s just performance-ing art in the end, These artists we hate yet adore: That pompously-arrogant, smugly-camp blend – Such wonderful caricature !
You often speak of they and them, So, so shall I. You see, I’m firmly one of them Whom you decry as sheep or swine Who are too careless with their gaze. But Don, I also use that phrase, I also have my thems and theys – And you are one of mine.
For you, like they, have ordered me To venerate your saints: Picasso, Rothko, and Matisse – Apostles in their paints. Never must my adulation cease Upon your feted clutch – But who’s the Zeus of all these gods ? Of course, your martyred Dutch !
I know, I know, it’s treason, But I still think that depression, Though it’s pretty good a-reason Is a really bad excuse For his whingey self-obsession, And his self-harming abuse, And for his total lack of wit, And being such an all-round shit.
But what’s the use ? You won’t agree. And truth to tell, that was obtuse of me – Both me and him are far more complicated Than we either you or I have stated. And anyway, let’s judge the work and not the man – Who cares if he’s a relic or a brash young Turk ? Except you’re doing all you can To make the man the work.
So here I stand – a heretic – A unbowed Philistine and hick. For Don, though I can listen fine, I’ll never like the tune he played. Ironic’ly, I quite like yours – A modern hymn to hector and persuade. I guess that Vincent makes you happy, And for that, I’m happy too. Just never try to set me free.
Rhyming Couplets 