Disharmony

Dutch writer Gerard Nolst Trenité’s 1920 poem “The Chaos” is a polemic on the senselessness of English pronunciation:

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.

Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.

Sword and sward, retain and Britain
(Mind the latter how it’s written).
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say–said, pay–paid, laid but plaid.

The full text is here.

| Language · Poems

Limerick

A Maths Master, teaching at Rye,
Bought his pupils a succulent π.
But we’re sorry to state
That 3/8
With 6=7 knows why.

— Punch, Sept. 29, 1937, via William R. Ransom, One Hundred Mathematical Curiosities, 1953

(I read this as “three overate, with sick sequels, heaven knows why.”)

| Poems · Science & Math

Offering

In Have Ye No Homes To Go To?, his 2016 history of the Irish pub, Kevin Martin quotes an 11th-century poem attributed to St. Brigid of Kildare, who once turned water into beer:

https://pixabay.com/fr/illustrations/bi%C3%A8re-chope-de-bi%C3%A8re-krug-verre-4316330/

I’d like to give a lake of beer to God.
I’d love the heavenly
Host to be tippling there
For all eternity.

I’d love the men of Heaven to live with me,
To dance and sing.
If they wanted, I’d put at their disposal
Vats of suffering.

I’d sit with the men, the women of God
There by the lake of beer
We’d be drinking good health forever
And every drop would be a prayer.

| Poems

Exchange

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Clement_Attlee_by_George_Harcourt,_1946.jpg

In 1951 Clement Attlee received this message from 15-year-old Ann Glossop, who had completed her final exams at Penrhos College only to discover that under recent reforms she was considered too young to graduate and must wait a year and go through them again:

Would you please explain, dear Clement
Just why it has to be
That Certificates of Education
Are barred to such as me?

I’ve worked through thirteen papers
But my swot is all in vain
Because at this time next year
I must do them all again.

Please have pity, Clement,
And tell the others too.
Remove the silly age-limit
It wasn’t there for you.

He replied:

I received with real pleasure
Your verses, my dear Ann.
Although I’ve not much leisure
I’ll reply as best I can.

I’ve not the least idea why
They have this curious rule
Condemning you to sit and sigh
Another year at school.

You’ll understand that my excuse
For lack of detailed knowledge
Is that school certs were not in use
When I attended college.

George Tomlinson is ill, but I
Have asked him to explain
And when I get the reason why
I’ll write to you again.

He lost office shortly thereafter, so Ann’s problem was never solved.

| History · Poems

Counterpoint

In 1924 British journalist William Norman Ewer published an antisemitic couplet:

How odd of God
To choose the Jews.

It’s been met with at least six responses. From Leo Rosten:

Not odd of God.
Goyim annoy ‘im.

From Cecil Brown:

But not so odd
As those who choose
A Jewish God
Yet spurn the Jews.

Three anonymous replies:

Not odd of God
His son was one.

Not odd, you sod
The Jews chose God.

How strange of man
To change the plan.

And Yale political scientist Jim Sleeper wrote:

Moses, Jesus, Marx, Einstein, and Freud;
No wonder the goyim are annoyed.

| Poems · Religion

Fellowship

O blessed Letters, that combine in one
All ages past, and make one live with all:
By you we doe conferre with who are gone,
And the dead-living unto councell call:
By you th’ unborne shall have communion
Of what we feele, and what doth us befall.

— Samuel Daniel, Musophilus, 1599

| Poems

Near Miss

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eupodotis_cristata_-_1820-1860_-_Print_-_Iconographia_Zoologica_-_Special_Collections_University_of_Amsterdam_-_UBA01_IZ17200037.tif

I just bumbled into this: In 1978 Isaac Asimov judged a limerick contest run by Mohegan Community College in Norwich, Conn. He chose this as the best of 12,000 entries:

The bustard’s an exquisite fowl,
With minimal reason to growl:
He escapes what would be
Illegitimacy
By grace of a fortunate vowel.

It was written by retired Yale official George D. Vaill. Asimov said, “The idea is very clever and made me laugh, and the one-word fourth line is delightful.”

| Literature · Poems

“Reading Laozi”

“Those who speak know nothing;
Those who know are silent.”
These words, as I am told,
Were spoken by Laozi.
If we are to believe that Laozi
Was himself one who knew,
How comes it that he wrote a book
Of five thousand words?

— Bai Juyi

| Poems