“Surrealist Landscape”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Metamorphosis_of_Narcissus.jpg

On the pale yellow sands
Where the Unicorn stands
And the Eggs are preparing for Tea
Sing Forty
Sing Thirty
Sing Three.

On the pale yellow sands
There’s a pair of Clasped Hands
And an Eyeball entangled with string
(Sing Forty
Sing Fifty
Sing Three.)
And a Bicycle Seat
And a Plate of Raw Meat
And a Thing that is hardly a Thing.

On the pale yellow sands
There stands
A Commode
That has nothing to do with the case.
Sing Eighty
Sing Ninety
Sing Three.
On the pale yellow sands
There’s a Dorian Mode
And a Temple all covered with Lace
And a Gothic Erection of Urgent Demands
On the Patience of You and of Me.

— Lord Berners

| Art · Poems

Heart and Soul

pedal triangle theorem

From a point P, drop perpendiculars to the sides of a surrounding triangle. This defines three points; connect those to make a new triangle and drop perpendiculars to its sides. If you continue in this way, the fourth triangle will be similar to the original one.

In 1947, Mary Pedoe memorialized this fact with a poem:

Begin with any point called P
(That all-too-common name for points),
Whence, on three-sided ABC
We drop, to make right-angled joints,
Three several plumb-lines, whence ’tis clear
A new triangle should appear.

A ghostly Phoenix on its nest
Brooding a chick among the ashes,
ABC bears within its breast
A younger ABC (with dashes):
A figure destined, not to burn,
But to be dropped on in its turn.

By going through these motions thrice
We fashion two triangles more,
And call them ABC (dashed twice)
And thrice bedashed, but now we score
A chick indeed! Cry gully, gully!
(One moment! I’ll explain more fully.)

The fourth triangle ABC,
Though decadently small in size,
Presents a form that perfectly
Resembles, e’en to casual eyes
Its first progenitor. They are
In strict proportion similar.

The property generalizes: Not only is the third “pedal triangle” of a triangle similar to the original triangle, but the nth “pedal n-gon” of an n-gon is similar to the original n-gon.

| Poems · Science & Math

“Winter Eve”

Drear fiend: How shall this spay be dent?
I jell you no toque — I do not know.
What can I do but snatch the woe
that falls beyond my pane, and blench
my crows and ted my briny shears?
Now galls another class. I’ll sit
and eye the corm that’s fought in it.
Maces will I fake, and heart my pare.
Is this that sold elf that once I was
with lapped chips and tolling lung?
I hollow sward and tight my bung
for very shame, and yet no cause —
save that the beery witchery
of Life stows grail. Shall I abroad?
Track up my punks? Oh gray to pod
for him who sanders on the wee!
I’ll buff a stag with shiny torts
and soulful hocks, a truthbush too,
perhaps a rook to bead — but no!
my wishes must be dashed. Reports
of danger shake the reaming scare.
Whack against blight! Again that tune,
“A gritty pearl is just like a titty prune”
blows from the fox. I canot bear
this sweetness. Silence is best. I mat
my mistress and my sleazy lumber.
I’ll shake off my toes, for they encumber.
What if I tub my stow? The newt
goes better fakèd to the cot.
I’ll hash my wands or shake a tower,
(a rug of slum? a whiskey sour?)
water my pants in all their plots,
slob a male hairy before I seep —
and dropping each Id on heavy lie,
with none to sing me lullaby,
slop off to dreep, slop off to dreep.

— Robert Morse, quoted in W.H. Auden’s commonplace book A Certain World

| Language · Poems

Terrible Poetry

We turned, as the winter-flakes fell from the cloud,
And the keen wind blew colder and colder;
And there, in his little grey coffin and shroud,
Left our darling to silently moulder.

— Henry Doman, “The Burial of the Darling,” from “The Cathedral” and Other Poems, 1864

Attend, ye fair, ye thoughtless, and ye gay!
For Mira dy’d upon the nuptial day!
The grave, cold bridegroom! clasp’d her in his arms,
And kindred worms destroyed her pleasing charms.

— Henry More, “Night Thoughts,” from An Elegaic Poem Amidst the Ruins of an Abbey, 1803

I tell you I’m the youngest son of five;
And three lie in their gore
Down by the great hall-door,
And Fred and I are all that are alive.

— John Stanyan Bigg, “The Huguenot’s Doom,” from Shifting Scenes, and Other Poems, 1862

Yet to the mariner, when tempest tost,
Thy presence brings to him but sore dismay;
Contact with thee, all hope were surely lost,
Death then engulphs his helpless prey.

— William Igglesden, “To an Iceberg in the Southern Ocean,” from Poetical Miscellanea, 1858

S.L. Francis’ 1760 “Elegy on Colonel Robert Montgomery Written on the Fatal Spot Where the Lamentable Duel Transpired” ends with the line “Submerged he lies, co-wretched am I now.” “All poets write bad poetry,” wrote Umberto Eco. “Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.”

| Poems

Bestial Passion

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gorilla_2_(PSF).png

In 1993 Jacques Jouet wrote a love poem in the language of the great apes in the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs:

Zor hoden tanda
Kagoda bolgani
Rak gom tand-panda
Yato kalan mangani
Kreegh-ah yel greeh-ah
Kreegh-ah zu-vo bolgani
Greeh-ah tand-popo
Ubor zee kalan mangani.

Where are you going, gorilla,
In the dark forest?
You run without a sound
Seeking the female ape.
Beware of love
Watch out, gorilla
A lover dies of hunger
Of thirst, of hoping for the leg of the female great ape.

“The great-ape language has the peculiarity of being composed of a lexicon of less than 300 words,” Jouet notes. “In the absence of any information, it must be deemed that the syntax is according to the user’s preference, as are the pronunciation and prosody.”

(From Raymond Queneau’s Oulipo Laboratory, 1995.)

| Language · Poems

In a Word

vespine
adj. pertaining to wasps

vespiary
n. a nest of wasps

Lord Dunsany and John Drinkwater were appearing as guests of honor at the Poetry Society of America when they fell into a friendly dispute over the relative merits of rhymed verse and rhythmical prose. Dunsany asked, “Supposing you had a line of rhymed verse ending with the word wasp. Where, I ask you, could you find a rhyme for wasp?”

In the words of the Boston Transcript‘s Alice Lawton, “That was the evening’s Parthian shot. Mr. Drinkwater produced no rhyme for ‘wasp.'”

But Arthur Guiterman, who was in the audience, later recalled, “You can find a rhyme for wasp. There is a perfectly good one in the dictionary. I found it at home that night. It is knosp and means a flower bud, or a budlike architectural ornament. Of course, having found it, I had to use it at once.”

I saw a Melancholy Wasp
Upon a Purple Clover Knosp,
Who wept, “The Poets do me Wrong,
Excluding me from Noble Song —
Though Pure am I and Wholly Crimeless —
Because, they say, my Name is Rhymeless!
Oh, had I but been born a Bee,
With Heaps of Words to Rhyme with me,
I should not want for Panegyrics
In Sonnets, Epics, Odes and Lyrics!
Will no one free me from the Curse
That bars my Race from Lofty Verse?”
“My Friend, that Little Thing I’ll care for
At once,” said I — and that is wherefore
So tenderly I set that Wasp
Upon a Purple Clover Knosp.

| Language · Poems

A Six-Legged Hiawatha

“Tribes of the Scale Wings,” an appallingly terrible poem by Edward Newman, 1857:

Let us take a stroll, my Laura,
Down Farm Lane and to the sedge pond,
Where thy father often fishes
For the pretty water beetles,
Grapii and branchiatus,
Hubneri and marginalis,
Agilis and punctulatus,
Ater, Sturmii and fusous,
Pretty Colymbetes fuscus,
That my Laura once caught flying.
Thence we’ll turn to rural Burnt Ash.
Haply we may meet with Stainton,
With his ardent class around him.
As we walk I’ll try and teach thee
Something more about the Scale Wings.
Lepidoptera, or Scale Wings,
Are the butterflies and night moths,
And we know them by the scaled wings,
And the mouth, so like a watch spring,
Coiled up underneath their faces …

[this goes on for nine pages]

… But their structure, so abnormal,
Serves to indicate the sequence
Of the Tipulæ or Craneflies,
Which we must ere long consider.
This discourse on Scale Wings ended,
I will pick these purple vetches,
Purple vetches, Vicia cracca,
And I’ll twine them in a chaplet,
And the Queen of Scale Wings crown thee.

Newman’s collection The Insect Hunters contains corresponding odes to the Diptera, Hymenoptera, Coleoptera, Stegoptera, Neuroptera, Hemiptera, and Orthoptera, including an affectionate nod to earwigs.

| Poems

“O! Wherefore”

Robert Peter wrote these lines on March 23, 1838, on leaving London for Jamaica. Christopher Adams named Peter one of the worst English poets, presumably for the immortal last line.

O! wherefore pensive heaves that sigh?
Why is thy face o’ercast with sorrow?
Thy throbbing bosom heaving high;
And wherefore should thy grief-dimmed eye
That tint of melancholy borrow?

‘Tis thus with me; I cherish dear
Each fond memorial of affection;
My heart the impress still shall wear —
Though fate doth now asunder tear
Those ties, the cause of my dejection.

For soon the dark, deep, rolling waves
Of wild Atlantic shall us sever;
And while around me ocean raves,
Still warm remembrance friendship craves;
Thee, M.M. Woods, forget I’ll never!

| Poems

Reversible Rhyme

Word Ways reader Art Benjamin found this limerick on a blackboard at Carnegie Mellon in the 1980s:

First let me say that I’m cursed.
I’m a poet who gets time reversed.
Reversed time,
Gets who poet a I’m,
Cursed I’m that say me let first.

No author was given.

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