Thwarted

Catchy tune, good lyrics, even an engaging video (though I'm not really a music video guy), but they can't make up for a truly excrable refrain:

For some better Stereophonics songs, there's A Thousand Trees, More Life in Tramp's Vest, Mr. Writer, or Caravan Holiday (live and acoustic unfortunately).  Kelly Jones has a fabulously unique voice, and I love the effect of the way he can just pile on words in "A Thousand Trees" or "More Life in a Tramp's Vest."  Maybe he should have a poetry album?

This post is dedicated to Rico, who I think rightly diagnosed the thoroughly inadequate response level from our massive readership.

Because I Can't Find It Anywhere Else on the Web . . .

Secondary Epic

W. H. Auden

No, Virgil, no:
Not even the first of the Romans can learn
His Roman history in the future tense,
Not even to serve your political turn;
Hindsight as foresight makes no sense.

How was your shield-making god to explain
Why his masterpiece, his grand panorama
Of scenes from the coming historical drama
Of an unborn nation, war after war,
All the birthdays needed to pre-ordain
The Octavius the world was waiting for,
Should so abruptly, mysteriously stop,
What cause should he show why he didn't foresee
The future beyond 31 B.C.,
Why a curtain of darkness should finally drop
On Carians, Morini, Gelonians with quivers,
Converging Romeward in abject file,
Euphrates, Araxes and similar rivers
Learning to flow in a latinate style,
And Caesar be left where prophecy ends,
Inspecting troops and gifts for ever?
Wouldn't Aeneas have asked:--"What next?
After this triumph what portends?"

As rhetoric your device was too clever:
It lets us imagine a continuation
To your Eighth Book, an interpolation,
Scrawled at the side of a tattered text
In a decadent script, the composition
Of a down-at-heels refugee rhetorician
With an empty belly, seeking employment,
Cooked up in haste for the drunken enjoyment
Of some blond princeling whom loot had inclined
To believe that Providence had assigned
To blonds the task of improving mankind.

. . . Now Mainz appears and starry New Year's Eve

As two-horned Rhine throws off the Latin yoke

To bear the Vandal on his frozen back;

Lo! Danube, now congenial to the Goth,

News not unwelcome to Teutonic shades

And all lamenting beyond Acheron

Demolished Carthage or a plundered Greece:

And now Juturna leaves the river-bed

Of her embittered grievance--loud her song,

Immoderate her joy--for word has come

Of treachery at the Salarian Gate.

Alaric has avenged Turnus. . . .

No, Virgil, no:

Behind your verse so masterfully made

We hear the weeping of a Muse betrayed.

Your Anchises isn't convincing at all:

It's asking too much of us to be told

A shade so long-sighted, a father who knows

That Romulus will build a wall,

Augustus found an Age of Gold,

And is trying to teach a dutiful son

The love of what will be in the long run,

Would mention them both but not disclose

(Surely, no prophet could afford to miss,

No man of destiny fail to enjoy

So clear a proof of Providence as this.)

The names predestined for the Catholic boy

Whom Arian Odovacer will depose.

1959

Another Poem

Prince of Wales tea.
It's good for you and me.
Hidey, hidey, ho.
Heedy, heedy, hee.

---

It also makes damn good coin jar.

Poetic Interlude

Silky smoothness
I'll never again neglect to
Change
Your blades regularly
Fusion

Because It's Damn Good

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep.

Nice

Lines 8-21 from the Prologue of William Langland's Piers Plowman (ca. late 14th c.), translated by George Economou:

I dreamed most marvelously, as I recall,
All the world's wealth and all of its woe,
Dozing that I was, I certainly saw;
Truth and treachery, treason and guile,
Sleeping I saw them all, as I shall record.
I looked to the East toward the rising sun
And saw a tower--I took it Truth was inside.
To the West then I looked after a while
And saw a deep dale--Death, as I believe,
Dwelled in that place, along with wicked spirits.
Between them I found a fair field full of folk
Of all manner men, the common and poor,
Working and wandering as this world asks us.

I think Economou could have tried a little harder with the alliteration. From what I understand, which isn't much, one wants to have alliteration in both halves of the verse. Using that as the standard Economou fails a little too often for my taste. Still, a marvelous bit.