Having spent a while on this it has been a treat to now read the poems you others have come up with. Hearty laughter ensued! My own isn't quite in that vein. I am uncertain of its worth, having neglected scansion. My rhymes are lax and few.
The Mariner’s Encounter
Round many western islands have I been.
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
I wandered lonely as a cloud;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Then after roaming far and wide
Shop after shop, with symbols, blazoned names,
I came upon her without warning,
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Finding thy worth a limit past my praise,
Full beautiful – a faery’s child!
Handsomest of all the women,
Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot;
And now it is an angel's song,
"O stay," the maiden said, "and rest
In the tea-shop’s ingle-nook.
Sources:
John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
William Topaz McGonagall, The Tay Bridge Disaster
William Wordsworth, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
WB Yeats, Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
Robert Service, The Quest
William Wordsworth, The Prelude, book 7
Robert Graves, Darien
AE Housman, Loveliest of Trees
William Shakespeare, Sonnets, LXXXII
John Keats, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, IV
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hiawatha’s Wooing
Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, Fit the Second
Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric, 5
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, V
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Excelsior
John Betjeman, In a Bath Tea-Shop
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