[Golias]

Villanelles are villainous,
Sestinas supercilious.
Odes are often odious,
Epics too commodious,
Triolets too literary
Limericks unsanitary.
Pindarics and Petrarchians
Are not for us Ozarkians.
The ballad, whether said or sung,
Better suits the Western tongue.
Some sonnets, I admit, are swell:
Jonson's and Johnson's (Lionel),
Spenser's and Sydney's. Also fine
Are Shakespeare's, Milton's, Mezey's and mine.
************************************
And from Frances Cornford:

In the Backs (at Cambridge)

Too many of the dead, some I knew well,
Have smelt this unforgotten river smell,
Liquid and old and dank;
And on the tree-dark, laquered, slowly passing stream
Have seen the boats come softly as in dream
Past the green bank.
So Camus, reverend sire, came footing slow
three hundred years ago,
And Milton paced the avenue of trees
In miracle of sun and shade as now,
The fresh-attempted glorious cadences
Behind his youthful brow.

Milton and Chaucer, Herbert, Herrick, Gray,
Rupert, and you forgotten others, say—
Are there slow rivers and bridges where you have gone
away?
What has your spirit found?
What wider lot?
Some days in spring do you come back at will,
And tread with weightless feet this ancient ground?
O say, if not,
Why is this air so sacred and so still?







[This message has been edited by Golias (edited November 22, 2006).]