Transatlantic Cable 1 – The Wake
The sea is wide, my son, so wide,
And the wind is free, so free –
The sea is long to the other side,
And the currents strong on the Westward tide.
Don’t tarry here because I cried –
Your boat is at the quay.
The land is big, I hear, so big,
The boat is small, is she –
But you must leave aboard this brig,
To seek out better roots to dig.
I know you won’t return, my sprig –
You won’t return to me.
Next Part >>>
Frontispiece
On the Inability of many Victorians
to adequately append to their Dissertations
such short and succinct titular Benamings
as would better serve their weighty Publications
without exposure to crucial Details
of sundry Devices and Plots thus delineated
by which the presumed Reader is disprivileged
and their subsequent Enpleasurement undersated.
The Raggèd-Rouser Novelist
The trouble with writers, back in that day,
They never had chances to finish the job –
Just splash on the whitewash, any old way,
And promise and short-change and rob.
Too many loose-ends and threpenny warts,
Too many set-ups with no second coat –
Till Misery’s suddenly out of his sorts,
And the author is slashing our throats.
I came for satire, complexity, and human drama – but left with cyphers and a lecture…
Train-Sporting
Once upon a rail,
When the locomotives first set sail,
Their engineers, they already knew
That these were not just drab machines –
No, each was special to her crew,
Bedecked and tendered like a queen –
And painted – donned with pride and with blue,
Protected with their red, and enamoured with their green.
Stephenson Trials
Melanie Marr, coming home on the train
From a day-out in York and the Railway Museum –
So many locos, and no time to see them,
And only their colours stood out, in the main.
From the first Locomotive, a wood-and-black fellow,
The blaze of the Rocket, so pristine, so yellow !,
To Brightons in umber, and Cambrian grey –
But the big four were coming to sweep them away…
Brunswick
A little lighter than British Racing,
But darker than Southern and LNER –
The perfect green, thought Melanie Marr,
A green both dignified and bracing !
So Great Westerns got her vote,
If she really had to make a pick.
Some may call it middle Brunswick,
They just called it locomotive.
Malachite
Melanie never like malachite,
Forever sandwiched inbetween –
It wasn’t deep and it wasn’t bright,
But under-ripe, and over-green.
They could have had electric blue,
Or merchant-navy silver grey –
However fast the boat-train flew,
That green would never save the day.
Apple
The apple was fine, but they just couldn’t settle –
A little unsure on the colour of metal.
The Mallard was blue, much to Melanie’s sighs,
With garter and overcoat worn in disguise.
They’d muddied their branding, they’d chilled their panache –
Are apples too homely for cutting a dash ?
Why be so ashamed of so fruitful a sheen ?
If you’re gonna break records, then break them in green !
Crimson Lake
A name, she thought, like a matinee idol –
A Paisley lass, or maybe Crewe,
Who caught the deep red train to London,
Changing her name, and her accent too.
By the time she disembarked at Euston,
She already was a star –
Ready to faint in the melodramas,
Ready to dine in the restaurant car.
Rail Blue
British Railways had the pick,
And flirted with a lively blue,
But switched it back to Brunswick, quick,
And endless green would have to do.
But when the Railways stubbed to Rail,
They tried a blue which hid the dirt –
For Melanie, no greater hurt
Could now disgrace the midnight mail.
Franchise Rainbow
Privitised, and multi-coloured,
Trains of ev’ry shade but beige –
And some are old Great Western-dressed,
But Melanie is not impressed.
Call her spotter, call her dullard,
But that was a diff’rent age –
Now trains are sleek, but lacking sheen –
Yet marketed by all as ‘green’.
Maroon
The final leg to Rayners Lane,
Yet not a trace inside the train
Of the gorgeous purple of the Met.
The tube-line on the map is all we get.
But once the poles and seats would say
That here maroon could still be found
Within her train to work each day,
When she was scarlet-fronted, Euston-bound.
The Future’s Bright
Melanie, though now retired,
Imagines what intrepid acts
Await for her on down the tracks
To get her boiler fired.
In any livery, it’s plain
That market-men have simply shown
What engineers have always known –
A train is never just a train.
Bottom of the Barrel
I saw an organ grinder and his capuchin the other day –
He made an awful racket, and the monkey didn’t want to play,
And no surprise !, the poor bedraggled creature looked a broken thing,
Half-starved and half-exhausted, on a short and fraying string.
The organist was little better – no musician with a skill –
He simply turned the handle to produce the loud and flat and shrill.
I ought to add, this wasn’t in a smart and swanky part of town,
Because the rich have constables to move them on and shut them down.
Instead, they haunt the humble in the poorest, foulest thoroughfare,
In begging half a penny from the folks who haven’t one to spare.
But still I stopped, and watched that doleful monkey, as his master hawked,
And wondered what he might have dreamt of, if he only could have talked…
“I’d rather be a monkey than an organ grinder, any day –
We monkeys gets to leap and dance, and gen’rally to have our way,
And sport a hand-made uniform, and all the grapes that we can eat,
And always play to cheering crowds from Berkeley Square to Gower Street.
And yet the world is quick to view me as a lackey or buffoon –
But grinders only get to grind, and grind, and grind all afternoon.”
I saw an organ grinder and his capuchin the other day –
And shared a knowing look, we three, of how they’d soon be swept away.
Smiths & Joneses
Once there was a time when a man was his surname –
The only name they ever used at school, or in the Guards.
A gentleman at club would be hailed as little better
Than the sappers in the trenches or the inmates in the yards.
Forenames were for sissies and for ladies – or your relatives,
And only then because they else would all be called the same.
Soon as breeched and blazered, they were down to the initial –
All that mattered was the fam’ly silver and the fam’ly name,
But one or two more wily gents had first-names not to be ignored –
Jerome K Jerome and Ford Madox Ford…
This poem is dedicated to William Carlos Williams.
Lost Couplets from The Auguries of Innocence
A louse plucked from a child’s hair
Shall cause this world to grow less fair.
A guinea worm dug from an eye
Shall leave behind a greater stye.
A flea disturbed before she dines
Is desecration of the shrines.
For veins of blood washed free of flukes
Shall topple kings and pillage dukes.
Each tapeworm flushed from out the gut
Shall see our stenchful filth in glut.
And tortures wait in Hell for he
Who cures amoebic dysent’ry.
Punctilagogaloquociatude
Poor poor Johnny Dryden
Thinks that English is too English –
Wishes it could be more Latin,
Than this horde that he’s combatting.
But he’s heading for a hiding
If he thinks our mongrel language
Is a synonym for Latin,
Somehow ripe for reformatting.
Poor poor Johnny Dryden
Hates those final prepositions –
Keep them out, just like in Latin,
Else we’ll really let the cat in.
Always ready for some chiding,
He polices our transmissions
Should we stray away from Latin
In our ungrammatic chatting.
Poor poor Johnny Dryden,
Hates infinitives to split –
After all, you can’t in Latin…
Oh, to truly scholar that in !
But the mobs are over-riding
All his careful rules to bits !
Ripping off their hairshirt Latin
For their English shifts of satin.
The title is pronounced PUNK-till-uh-gog-uh-low-KWO-shah-tyood.
By George !
Bernard Shaw, as sharp as a razor,
Quite at home in a tie and blazer.
But his beard is less Belgravian –
He may be Shaw, but never Shavian.
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…
Rhyming Couplets 