Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Declaiming: No. 13 in an occasional series entitled 'Harmless Hobbies for Mad Old Bags'.



















Tempted to give it a try Here's a suitable specimen - but it's up to you to find the appropriate wind-swept battlement or tragic riverbank ...

Oooh to be McGonagall's Lovechild
for William Topaz McGonagall

Oooch! To be the lovechild of William McGonagall and Julia A. Moore,
Those idiosyncratic and misunderstood souls who lived in times they would doubtless have referred to as yore:
Yes! The Sweet Singer of Michigan and the bard of the beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay
Whose reputations are regrettably tinged with derision to this very day.
As to scansion, it is true that their grasp could be said to equal that of a wet cat on a slate rooftop
As if, in building a head of poetic steam, they found it too painful to stop.
With no small cost to euphony and a regrettable tendency, most of the time
To abandon cadence for the sake of a half-broken rhyme,
But never let it be said in this fair land that the passion that flowed in their pages
Failed to engorge the imagination and mesmerise the mind, even of hitherto unswayable sages.
And so I proclaim to the world that, on this basis alone,
These two remarkable literary nightingales should be shown
To thrones of glory flanking the enrobed marbly thighs of sacred Euterpe the muse,
While the rest of us, fettered and unworthy, can only shake our heads and kneel at their shoes.
© Ynes Sanz Brisbane 2010

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