WorldMagBlog

6 Comments to “Friday poem”

1. 1. by llama 05.16.08 at 4:28 pm

   Oh My!

2. 2. by Harris 05.16.08 at 5:11 pm

   LOL. That was fun.

   Reminds me of Mark Twain’s line,
   “As to the adjective: when it doubt strike it out.”

3. 3. by kimberly 05.16.08 at 5:21 pm

   With regards to Ogden Nash and apologies for a looong post:

   One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
   Would be a more restricted employment by the authors of simile and
   metaphor.
   Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,
   Can’t seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to
   go out of their way to say that it is like something else.
   What does it mean when we are told
   That that Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold?
   In the first place, George Gordon Byron had enough experience
   To know that it probably wasn’t just one Assyrian, it was a lot of
   Assyrians.
   However, as too many arguments are apt to induce apoplexy and
   thus hinder longevity.
   We’ll let it pass as one Assyrian for the sake of brevity.
   Now then, this particular Assyrian, the one whose cohorts were
   gleaming in purple and gold,
   Just what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a
   wold on the fold?
   In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy
   there are great many things.
   But I don’t imagine that among them there is a wolf with purple
   and gold cohorts or purple and gold anythings.
   No, no, Lord Byron, before I’ll believe that this Assyrian was
   actually like a wolf I must have some kind of proof;
   Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red
   mouth and big white teeth and did he say Woof Woof?
   Frankly I think it is very unlikely, and all you were entitled to say,
   at the very most,
   Was that the Assyrian cohorts came down like a lot of Assyrian
   cohorts about to destroy the Hebrew host.
   But that wasn’t fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me no, he
   had to invent a lot of figures of speech and then interpolate them,
   With the result that whenever you mention Old Testament soldiers
   to people they say Oh yes, they’re the ones that a lot of
   wolves dressed up in gold and purple ate them.
   That’s the kind of thing that’s being done all the time by poets,
   from Homer to Tennyson;
   They’re always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison,
   And they always say things like that the snow is a white blanket
   after a winter storm.
   Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a six-inch blanket of
   snow and I’ll sleep under a half-inch blanket of unpoetical
   blanket material and we’ll see which one keeps warm,
   And after that maybe you’ll begin to comprehend dimly
   What I mean by too much metaphor and simile.

4. 4. by Peter L 05.16.08 at 5:54 pm

   I like how the poet leaves the subject of the verb out of the last clause. Effective.

5. 5. by Kyle A 05.16.08 at 6:33 pm

   I love it! That is such a fun and funny poem.

6. 6. by Xion 05.17.08 at 10:39 am

   Is the author of the poem commenting on bad grammar or the peculiar way in which English uses phrasal constructs?

   I am reading a book about learning a second language called Vocabulary Myths by Keith Folse. He points out that Germanic languages like English have phrasal verbs where as the ‘Latinate’ ones do not.

   So are these prepositions really dangling, as in: ‘lead in’, ‘lead on’ or is this just standard English? In German, “coffee to go” is said “take with”. That dangling preposition is necessary.

   English does all sorts of peculiar things with prepositions that cause very different meanings. Add pronouns back to their referents and you get “call him out”, which is not the opposite of “call him in”. We can “come up with” something and “come down with” something, but their meanings are quite different.

   Should Angles be chastened so for adoring and adopting the languages of all their conquerers?