Speccie: Backchat
 

Only Bill kept the Sphere in business this week. Congratulations to him. The new competition will, I think, attract more attention from our poets.


No. 2676: Backchat
You are invited to submit a reply to the poet from Wordsworth’s cuckoo or Keats’s nightingale (16 lines maximum). Please email entries to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 1 December.

Reminds me of the old classic test question (author forgotten):

"O cuckoo! Shall I call thee bird
Or but a wandering voice?"

State the alternative preferred,
With reasons for your choice.

Cuckoo

O poet, shall I call thee bard
Or just another twitcher?
I know the writing game is hard
And seldom makes you richer.

These woods and hills are like a church
And you are like a vicar
Enraptured by your endless search
For the Elysian liquor.

Your single sanctifying word
Can elevate the lowly
And change me from a robber bird
To something high and holy.

I am sincerely grateful for
Your verses neatly inked,
For should this planet warm some more
I may become extinct.

I like that one, John, especially the last stanza.

Gail, I believe that many people think that Auden wrote those lines, though no one can is sure.

Nice neat one, John. Until 2006 (on Dartmoor) I hadn't heard a cuckook for some thirty years, so the idea of their disappearance from the British Isles is hard to avoid.

Dear Wordsworth, really, no soft soap,
How nice you were to me!
You called me blessed, darling, hope,
A love, a mystery.

That other William - Stratford pest!-
Lent no such well-tuned ear;
My name - an all-too-facile jest -
He labelled ‘word of fear’.

Yet both my poets, deeply stirred,
Would put Time in the dock
To know that now I’m mostly heard
Inside some damned Swiss clock!

I hear them all the time in Canterbury, you will be glad to hear. And the number of barn owls, sparrow hawks and yellowhammers seems also to be increasing. Also buzzards. Never saw buzzards in Kent ntil a couple of years ago. Now they are all over the place. Oh and we have nightingales, lots of them. And something called an egret which I had seen only on Edwardian ladies' hats. Oh, and bitterns. Defintely bitterns.

I gave up trying to make the nightingale Keatsian, so made him a bit of a chav instead.

Darkling I've listened, too, while you orate
About my warbling till I've grown quite shirty.
John, mate, I'm singing to attract a mate,
Not “pouring forth my soul”- just being flirty.
That's what birds do. You think it's “rich to die”?
Well, we like life ('cause birds' lives are not long)
And it should need no genius to know why
We sing the old old song -
You're in a gloomy and romantic muddle.
Why not hop round to Fanny's for a cuddle?

Or hop somewhere. The lovely female birds
Won't come here if a poet's by my tree.
They want some action, not your gloopy words -
So kindly leave me be
To maximise my chance of jig-a-jig,
Before the day when I fall off my twig.

George, really jolly, surely a winner. John, glad to hear about the Kentish nightingales. I've only heard them in Spain. (Singing in daylight). Plenty of egrets in Devon now, but bitterns? Do you live by a reed-bed?

Nice one , George. Jerome, we have reed beds all over the place. The only thing we don't have are red squirrels. They have them on the Isle of Wight. But then you'd have to live on the Isle of Wight.

the red & the grey
 

Or in Formby, on the Merseyside, formerly Lancashire, coast, where there are thousands of the little bleeders & they are practically a cult. Notice how no one ever has a good word to say for grey squirrels, whose antics often cheer my gloomy walk into town? You can get away with anything these days unless you're a terrorist, a paedophile or a grey squirrel.

Nice one, George. I think the nightingale is harder. Or maybe it's just that I find it irresistible to make fun of Wordsworth.

The Cuckoo’s Reply to the Poet

O William! Shall I call you Bill?
How kind of you, dear Guest,
To come and watch me lay an egg
In a reed-warbler’s nest!

While dumber birds get bleary-eyed
Stuffing my kids’ big beaks,
I’m free to sing and herald Spring
To poets on the peaks.

I sometimes dine on eggs and chicks,
But insects are my vice.
A hairy caterpillar is
Particularly nice.

Try one, they’re delectable!
What’s that? You can’t stay?
I shall call Cuckoo! and anoint you
As you go your way.

the easy target
 

O Wordsworth! shall I call thee Bard,
Or but a wandering Mind
Who churns our doggerel by the yard
And talks through his behind?

A cuckoo is an actual bird
And not an abstract force
Or 'twofold shout' occultly heard
From some veiled, mystic source.

We cuckoos have two wings, two legs,
A beak, a tail, the works.
We fly around. We lay our eggs
(Though parenting's for jerks).

Your urge to disembody me
Needs imminent restraint.
A space invader I may be;
Ethereal I ain't.

Let me tell you, Bazza, that I have seen a black squirrel round here. And there's a white one in today's Daily Turdigraph. Far too many good cuckoos about. Here's a nightingale.


Nightingale

If I, a bird, may speak to you, a man,
Your state of mind gives rise to some alarm.
I’m giving you the best advice I can.
DON’T DRINK THAT HEMLOCK: it may do you harm.
It won’t be Lethe. It’ll be the Styx,
A one-way ticket to the terminus.
Is that your only option – down and out?
An everlasting fix
That fixes nothing? Life itself’s a plus,
And that’s what birds and poets sing about.

P.S. I said the same to Socrates.
He could have lived in Corinth at his ease

Ode to John Keats

The weariness, the fever, and the fret
are commonplace among the leaves, dear John,
where every rainfall makes my feathers wet
as you, the poet, pace your dry salon

declaiming that the problem in my head
is 'too much happiness.' Can you be real?
Now more than ever do I wish you dead.
Upon the midnight? Fine. Right now? Ideal.

My song is not my leisure, but my duty.
You sit there with your pen and think you're deep.
The truth? Birds have it bad. Enjoy your beauty.
The nightingale must wake so poets sleep.

I'd say George is good for the fiver, Catherine could do much better (call Clementine), John's latest is a winner, Roger's is a hot contender, Bazza's, though brilliant of course, is perhaps too angry - didn't charm me like the others. Jerome's needs more birdiness.

honky squirrel
 

'And there's a white one in today's Daily Turdigraph.'

In that publication it would have to be white unless it had committed a major (probably sexual) crime.

I think squirrels are committing sexual crimes all the time. Their private lives are a disgrace.

O Poet, since thy song began,
I hear but don't rejoice.
O Wordsworth! shall I call thee Man,
Or but a pompous Voice?

While thou art lying on the grass
Thy onefold shout I hear,
From hill to hill it seems to pass,
So humourless and drear.

Though babbling only to the Vale,
Of sunshine and of flowers,
Thy thoughts are dull, thy rhymes are stale,
Yet they go on for hours.

O blessed Man! the earth we share
I must confess I'd rather
Depart to go most anywhere
I wouldn't hear you blather.

.
O hoo-hoo! William, there you sit,
and court me with a verse.
Your love is running fowl a bit
and come to be a curse!

You call me “darling” and admire
my voice and very presence,
but yesterday I spied you, sire,
cavorting with the pheasants!

O hoo hoo! William, worthless words
assail me without stopping.
It’s time I soared like other birds,
descending with a dropping!
.

O blessed bard! You understood
me! Likewise, I rejoice
to once have known a man who could
appreciate my voice!

Most said it sounded crazy, or
they'd laughingly dispute
my song as being really more
a hiccup in a hoot.

A golden time indeed to hear
my music set to words!
But now that you're no longer near,
my singing's for the birds.

My empty cry just fades away
in echoes through the hills.
I wander, lonely, since the day
You spied those daffodils.

.
My feathered butt is sore
from sitting in a tree
and serenading you, John Keats,
while you’re in misery.
You say you want to fly to me,
but nothing doing, sir!
Pack up your pain, invent a plane,
and get thee to Big Sur!
.

TWEETS TO KEATS

Mr. Keats, you are confused.
I'm glad you like my song,
And yet the premise of your poem
Is simply, flat-out wrong.

We nightingales live just two years.
Your jealousy's misplaced.
While human beings feast on life,
We birds have just a taste.

So even if you get TB
And die at twenty-five,
Don't be envious of me:
I will not be alive.

Limerick

I pour forth my soul in the thicket.
My song is eternity's ticket.
Yet each of my tweets
means, "Dear Mr. Keats,
just take your damm poem and stick it."

mortal, not immortal
 

Neatly macabre, Roger.

Is there anybody else who simply can't read this:

O BLITHE New-comer! I have heard,
I hear thee and rejoice.
O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,
Or but a wandering Voice?

without hearing this?

A-well everybody’s heard about the bird
A-well a bird bird bird well-a bird is the word
Well everybody knows that the bird is the word

Drives me cuckoo!

And you, who chat up every birdie,
rejoicing to your core,
O Wordsorth! Shall I call you Wordy,
or but a wandering Bore?

You dare to say I babble, Bill?
Among your verses, plodding,
you never a met a daffodil
you didn’t set to nodding.

My twofold call has brevity.
What’s more, it has some wit,
regarded as a commentary
on who’s the bigger Twit.

Frank

.
A Nightingale by Any Other Name Would Be in Another Ode

.
All this warbling makes me weary,
my throat is sore, my life is dreary,
I can’t stand your poesy, Johnny, anymore.

When you croak, I’ll croak along,
I’ll sing a hoarse and merry song,
at your coffin I’ll be ravin’ "Nevermore!"
.