fullspate

A peep at English poetry

Where to begin the tour? How about limericks? Here's one:

There was an old man from Peru
Who dreamt he was eating his shoe.
He woke in the night
With a terrible fright,
And found it was perfectly true.

Why not try reading it out aloud. Almost all poetry is best appreciated when you read it aloud - it's the sound of a poem that makes it poetic.

To further appreciate the poem a bit of analysis helps too. There are always five lines in a limerick and there is a pattern of syllables in each line which is roughly the same in each little poem. The rhyming scheme is always the same too: the 1st, 2nd and last lines always rhyme with each other.

Someone else, after reading about Einstein's theory of relativity, according to which it would be possible to travel backwards in time if you could travel faster than the speed of light, came up with this:

There was a young lady named Bright
Who could travel much faster than light.
She started one day
In a relative way
And arrived on the previous night.

Admittedly, no one could make out that it is cool to be into limericks, but if we put our pretensions to being cool aside surely we can see that they are fun, even if it's only in a teeny weeny way.

How about a longer poem? This one was written by a man who absolutely hated the new towns that were being built for new businesses with their culture of work and money and cars and beer and the radio (the TV hadn't really got going at that point). The new town in question is called Slough (rhyming with "how"). The poet, John Betjeman, knows a few things about rural life. He knows about ploughing ('plough' also rhymes with 'how' and means 'turn the soil over before planting seeds), and about cows grazing (eating grass), and he knows what bees do when they all leave the hive together: they swarm.

Slough
Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town -
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half-a-crown
For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears.

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad,
They've tasted hell.

It's not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It's not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead.

And talk of sports and makes of cars
In various squalid pubs and bars
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

(Notes:
soppy sentimental
stern: strict
throat: neck
coastal shelf: is the shallow area of the sea around the coast.)

CLICK HERE for a little vocabulary revision.