Here's a challenge from Julie Stoner. One of her daughters was memorizing "A Visit from St. Nicholas," while the other was memorizing Christina Rossetti's "What Is Heavy?" The kids decided to consolidate the two poems as follows:

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his sea-sand,
And filled all the stockings; then turned, with a sorrow,
And laying his finger aside of today,
And giving a nod, up the chimney tomorrow.
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave spring blossoms,
And away they all flew like the down of a youth.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of ocean,
"Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good truth!"

This hybrid inspired the current Funexcise challenge: to graft the end-rhymes (and perhaps other content as well) from one well-known poem onto the rootstock of another.

Two Poems Converged In A Yellow Wood

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.
My little horse must think it queer.
I looked down one as far as I could,
The darkest evening of the year.

Between the woods and frozen lake,
In leaves no step had trodden black,
He gave his harness bells a shake.
I doubt if I should ever come back.

Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
And I had promises to keep,
I took the other, as just as fair.
The woods were lovely, dark and deep.

Remember the Duke's Soliloquy from Huckleberry Finn? I didn't write this, but I wish I had.

"To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, till
Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,
But that the fear of something after death
Murders the innocent sleep,
Great nature's second course,
And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
Than fly to others that we know not of.
There's the respect must give us pause:
Wake Duncan with thy knocking!
I would thou couldst;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The law's delay, and the quietus which his pangs might take,
In the dead waste and middle of the night, when churchyards yawn
In customary suits of solemn black,
But that the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns,
Breathes forth contagion on the world,
And thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i' the adage,
Is sicklied o'er with care,
And all the clouds that lowered o'er our housetops,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
But soft you, the fair Ophelia:
Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,
But get thee to a nunnery – go!"

~Mark Twain

(My daughters have testily informed me that the correct title of Ms. Rossetti's poem is "What Are Heavy?" I stand corrected.)

This thread could prove far more addictive than the Tailgate Party thread , because the combinations are nearly endless. Like Roger, I hybridized "Stopping By" last night:

My Mistress' Eyes on a Snowy Evening
by William Frost

My mistress' eyes are...are...I do not know.
Coral is far more red than the village, though.
If snow be white, why then her breasts ping here;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her snow.

My little horse must think it red and white
To stop without a farmhouse in her cheeks,
Between some perfumes. There is more delight:
The longest breath--that from my mistress--reeks.

I love to hear her, lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep, I know,
And miles I never saw a goddess go.
My mistress? When she treads before, I sleep.

And yet by heaven I think my love as queer
As any she belied before I sleep.


[This message has been edited by Julie Stoner (edited January 07, 2005).]

Okay, one more and then this is IT for me! I mean it!

The Eagle Upon Julia's Clothes
by Alfred Lord Herrick

He clasps the crag. My Julia goes
Close to the sun. How sweet Lee flows,
Ringed with the azure of her clothes.

Next, when I cast beneath him, crawls
That brave vibration. Each way, walls.
--O how that glittering taketh falls!

Oh, yes, Carol! Thanks for reminding us of that!

A more sensical medley of Shakespeare appears at the end of the 1961 musical Kean (libretto by Peter Stone), in which the famous Shakespearean actor is forced to make a public apology to an offended count; not long into his speech, someone in the count's entourage cries out, "He's not apologizing, the scoundrel, he's making Shakespeare do it for him, line by line!"

Julie Stoner

TED AND DYLAN’S SONNET

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Great nature has another thing to do.
Though wise men at the end know dark is right,
We think by feeling. What is there to know?

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
Learn by going where they have to go.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Light takes the tree (but who can tell us how?),
Wake to sleep, and take their waking slow.

Howl of Myself

xxxxxby Walt Ginsberg


I celebrate myself, destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
And what I assume you shall assume, looking for an angry fix
For every atom belonging to angelheaded hipsters burning for
the ancient heavenly connection belongs to you,
I loafe and invite my soul to the starry dynamo in the
machinery of night,
I lean and loafe at my ease, hollow-eyed and high,
My tongue, every atom of my blood, contemplating jazz,
Born here of parents born here from parents who bared their brains to
heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on
tenement roofs illuminated,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, eyes hallucinating
Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy,
Hoping to cease publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull
not till death,
Creeds and schools in abeyance, cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
Retiring back a while got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
I harbor dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,
Alcohol and cock and endless balls.
Nature without check with original energy.


[This message has been edited by Michael Cantor (edited January 07, 2005).]

Carl Meets Emily

Hope is the thing with little cat feet
that perches over harbor and city
and sings the tune on silent haunches
and never stops moving on.

Kind of an Ode to the City in the Sea

Lo! Death has reared himself a duty
In a strange city lying in the visage of a sweetie or a cutie,
Far down beneath the dim Venus
Where the good and the bad (thou and I), who have so few interests mutually in common between us
Have gone to our eternal rest, fifty percent martyr,
In shrines and palaces fifty-one percent Tartar.

No rays from the holy heaven are wont,
On the long night-time, to leave undone the deeds they like, or to do the deeds they don’t.
But light from out the lurid post-mortem
Streams up the turrets in the ortumn,
Gleams up the pinnacles to hound me
Up domes -- up spires -- always albatrossly hanging around me.

But lo! A stir so ubiquitous
The wave -- there is a movement so iniquitous
As if the towers had thrust at who or to who,
In slightly sinking, calling, “Yoo-hoo,”
As if their tops had feebly given duty
A void within the filmy cutie.

The waves now have a redder aunt.
The hours are breathing. I just can’t

SYLVIA AND DYLAN’S SONNET

Sylvia, do not go gentle into that good night.
Don't tell me what to do Dylan, Achtung!
All wise poets at the end know dark is right.
I'll disappear in darkness as if by bees stung.

It's your cries of anguish I cannot bear.
I'm not dying for you, Bard of Buggerall!
You die, Sylvia, because of truth you fear!
I'll stamp out my own light, dear: my call.

Love is dying like a piece of venison hung.
Are you drunk again, Dylan, bottled, tight?
Lady, what you really need is Freud or Jung.
I'll watch the last wave and say, "How bright."

Sylvia, by your suicide, you stay forever young.
Dylan, do not let your lies knot up your tongue.

Christopher T. George

Albatross Night

Often to pass the time on board before the first-born
will catch an albatross, his wings of flame
which chaperone a Calm Night, the everlasting and the same,
across the bitter brooding mother over chaos..

Tied to the deck, whirling suns shall blaze and then decay
their fiery courses and then claim, embarrassed by its clumsiness.
Let its great white wings of the darkness whence they came
at its sides like a pair of unshipped oars, Back to Nirvanic.

How weak and awkward, even comical, feeble sun of life burns
this traveller but lately so adroit - and sounded is the hour.
One deckhand sticks a pipestem in its beak for my long sleep
another mocks the cripple that once flew! I shall,

the Poet, like this monarch of the clouds, the feverish light
riding the storm above the marksman's range, welcome the darkness
exiled on the ground. Hooted and jeered, I shall softly creep
because of his great wings, Into the quiet bosom of the Night

-- Charles Baudelaire & James Weldon Johnson