A Chance Meeting

H.M. Holloway Prison, ca. 1896

Well, hi! How nice to find you here

In this unusual setting. It’s been awhile,

You look just as you did then, up near.

Cool’s always in style!

Me? Don’t ask. Not well, I fear.

Old age, you know—a trial!

Isn’t this the dress you wore that fall

To Piers Horey’s do, at Rainham Hall?

How’s Piers these days? No, you don’t say!

Can’t believe that he’s no more!

So, then, the bugger’s gone today.

He loved life—was mad that way.

I remember him telling Jemima Minor:

Come, love, you’ve had a cock in your mouth before!

At 3 a.m on the dining-room floor.

News of Prudie? There’s not that much,

Married up, and now she’s Dutch—

A Dutch duchess, you understand!

What of Lefty, remember him?

Worked like mad to beat the band.

Full of vigor, tons of vim.

I hear he became governor of the Bank of England,

Or was it Holloway Prison? Good for him!

Well, so it goes! Mustn’t keep you!

Won’t persist. For none of us no more exist.

Hail Pythagoras!

Fyodor Bronnikov, Pythagoreans Greeting the Rising Sun (1869). Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Ottava Rima would, I know, be proper,

    The proper instrument on which to pay

My compliments, but I should come a cropper;

    Rhyme-royal’s difficult enough to play.

—W. H. Auden, Letter to Lord Byron (1937)

Think five syllables

And not the rounder six,

Move up to sublime seven

And not eight’s bag of old-time tricks,

Then nine, close-fitting buttered bricks,

Odd numbers made in Grecian heaven.

Don’t go past the boundary of eleven,

Where thirteen bloviates on an unhallowed shore,

Where even Byron stumbles, not saying any more.

The fat Fourteener crashed and broke on Missolonghi’s beach.

The ripples of that breakup may be what wrecks one's reach.

If reach there be in Quantum’s Pickup Sticks,

Another bunch of specious tricky tricks.

Hail Pythagoras!

He knew what stops are best

limitations, and the rest—

Beastly death is just a hill of beans,

poetry and life not being what they seems.

Note: Wikipedia says,

“The ottava rima stanza in English consists of eight iambic lines, usually iambic pentameters. Each stanza consists of three alternate rhymes and one double rhyme, following the ABABABCC rhyme scheme.”

“The rhyme royal stanza consists of seven lines, usually in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is ABABBCC.”

“A fourteener is a line consisting of 14 syllables, which are usually made of seven iambic feet, for which the style is also called iambic heptameter.”

These rules might be fun to play around with, but I’m not bothered myself!

Rowse, His Cat

For A. L. Rowse

Proving that Emilia Bassano

was the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets,

beyond reasonable shadow of doubt,

Rowse next eulogized his white tom cat.*

"Then let us have our Liberty again,"

Emilia, herself a poet, said.

"Your fault being greater, why should you disdain

Our being equals, free from tyranny?"†

"My cat and I grow old together," Rowse sigh'd,

he who'd left Tommer in Trenarren

as the guardian of his Cornish domain,

gone Stateside as gainer of what gain?

Such are the quiddities of man and mouse

-r. My cat and I grow old together, too!

* A. L. Rowse, "The White Cat of Trenarren," in The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse, chosen by Philip Larkin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 351–52. The cat's name was actually Peter, but that might be puzzling, and Tommer—the name of another of Rowse's cats—fits better here.

† Æmelia Lanyer (née Bassano), Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), quoted in Rowse, Discovering Shakespeare: A Chapter in Literary History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 51–52.