Category: Literature

The Rose & The Nightingale

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a bit like the flag of japan

The Rose & The Nightingale

(In reply to Oscar Wilde)

Poor little student, moping for a girl,
He yearns to have a crimson rose to give her –
“Shucks !” thinks a nightingale, heart in a whirl,
“I’ll plead with the rose-bush to deliver !
But woe, all its blossoms are white as a pearl…
…Unless I thorn my breast and sing a-quiver.”

Thus the little nightingale gives her life for beauty,
As nothing but a lacky to a human.
Raising future nightingales – that should be her duty !
At this rate, extinction’s surely looming !
The rose, though, is delighted with this unexpected booty –
With birdie’s rotting body, times are blooming !

Lonely in her dying breath, as atoms fall apart,
She thinks this makes a handy metaphor –
The poor romantic soul who bares her tender little heart
For the callous world to savagely ignore.
(Like artists ev’rywhere, she demands we love her art,
And buy into her struggles and her lore.)

As for the student, he plucks the crimson rose
(Denying for this bud to spread its seed),
And seeks out his classmate with the very pretty nose –
But she looks less than happy with his weed.
“But don’t you see ?” he says, “This bloom’s a mutant !  I propose
To splice its genes and follow where they lead.”

“Pah!” says his paramour, crushing all his dreams,
“I’m bored with ev’ry rose and phlox and crocus !
For I’m in love with rubies, sparkling in the sun-beams –
I want to find a way to make them focus…”
The student is crushed – as is the crimson rose, it seems –
He’s had enough of love and hocus-pocus !

Sonnet for the Shrews

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aviator
Aviator by Billy Norrby

Sonnet for the Shrews

Come, mistress, stay – no patriarch am I !
No zealous male, yet you rebuke me so –
I never wish to dim your spark of eye,
For not all men are as Petruchio.
I plead, do not agglomerate my sex,
And score the mixture only by its worst –
When many brothers scant deserve this hex
Of deeming women-passionate as curst.
If chauvinistic authors grumble loud
And laud a brute as model for our kind,
Then know of we who wish you still unbowed
And retch at thoughts of taming such a mind.
Far better shrews, for shrewdness thence hath sprung
In women sharp of wit and swift of tongue.

The Voice Speaks

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wanderer
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Casper Friedrich

The Voice Speaks

(in reply to Rupert Brooke)

Late in the dusk, in the ancient woods
I saw a poet on my stroll
In desp’rate search for solitude,
At one with all and deep of soul.

I bid him “Ho !” and “What a view !”
But he just sighed at ‘one-of-those’.
From lofty heights, his dagger-eyes
Shot down along his haughty nose.

So strange, we took so diff’rently
To seeing beauty silver-pearled –
When I see set a sun so soft,
I want to share it with the world.

I guess for really clever chaps,
We little people must appal –
There’s some so full of inner peace,
They need no other folks at all.

An Ideal Crony

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ideal husband
A lobby card from the 1947 Hollywood adaptation of An Ideal Husband, artist unknown.

An Ideal Crony

Sir Robert Chiltern, Bart –
A plummy, chummy, bleeding heart,
Who made some loot insider trading –
Suddenly his star is fading
When extorted by a high-class tart.

What ho !, his chums in high-up places
Shall protect him from disgraces –
Don’t let on, don’t make a fuss,
For don’t you know he’s one of us ?
So stiffen up the lips on both his faces.

So what, a sacred trust was sold ?
We’d do the same for thirty gold !
So call the playwrite with the sharp wit,
Sweep it all beneath the carpet –
No need that the voting oiks be told…

Waifs & Fodder

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chatterton
The Death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis

Waifs & Fodder

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.

Katya

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farm cat

Katya

My life was good on Manor Farm –
Just catching rats and lapping milk,
And sleeping warm and safe from harm –
I had no qualms with Jones’s ilk.
Yet revolution saw it scrapped –
Ah well, a cat will soon adapt.

I let them give their speeches,
And I let them hold their votes,
As they banned all booze and breeches,
And they argued beets or oats.
I snoozed between the awed and rapt,
Because a cat can soon adapt.

By hoof and feather, cart and plough,
We each must labour, none must shirk –
But rodents are our comrades now,
So I am out of work.
My talents must remain untapped –
But hey, a cat shall soon adapt.

Yet I smell blood, and I smell fear,
Among the cowed who used to crow.
They ought to leave, but still they’re here –
For where else can these rebels go ?
They’ve made their home, and now they’re trapped.
Farewell – a cat must soon adapt.

Yes, I know – adult cats don’t drink milk. Or so the bourgeois would have us believe…

My Mind, She Runs

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sugar

My Mind, She Runs

I’ve always heard them say
That Golden Brown and Perfect Day
Are smuggling in some heroin
Cos that’s so rock & roll !
But I don’t think that’s such a feat
When looking at each lyric sheet –
There’s nothing there to threaten or cajole.

The Stranglers waltz around with metaphor
About…well, what ?
Some vagaries that lapse into an ideal love, perhaps,
To fox our trot, but little more.
And Lou is not opaque at all,
Just thanks for needed company –
And if it’s from a needle, well,
He fails to wink sufficiently.

Now, there’s no reason songs can’t hide
Another message deep inside,
But usually they’re straight ahead –
And if we let our fancies fly
We’re chasing diamonds in the sky
And swearing blind that Paul is dead.

Another supposed drug song is Under The Bridge.  I’m sure its author is sincere in explaining his motivation, but the lyrics themselves are far too generic, about nothing more than alienation in LA.  Coming to this blind, there is little chance of the listener decyphering just why Mr Kiedis is so gloomy.  Indeed, I still contest that the song is singing about lonliness, not about injections.  The latter may have caused the former, but that’s completely irrelevent to the song, because the song only cares to tell us that the singer is alone, not why they’re alone.

As to that why, there is one line that identifies the eponymous bridge as the place where the narrator “drew some blood”, which might point us in the right direction, but there’s absolutely no other line to back it up – causing your teenage author to wrongly assume it was talking about self-harm.

Of course, songwriters are under no obligation for their lyrics to be able to operate in a vacuum, theirs is a different medium, but don’t be surprised if the groovy kids a hundred years from now are scratching their heads and think it’s all about urban planning.

And on a completely unrelated matter, is heroin actually golden brown in colour ?  Not claiming to be an expert, but isn’t it either a black lump or a white powder ?  At least, that’s how it’s always shown in the movies…