[Maryann Corbett]

Perhaps I can encourage others to guess too if I guess in public and talk about the basis for guessing. (This rather reminds me of the qualifying exam for the doctoral program I took about a million years ago.)

I. Kipling--all that Britannia stuff.
II. Keats--all that death!
III. Maybe Swinburne--all that triple rhythm.

V. Sure looks like Wordsworth--the rural setting, the little girl.

VII. "Tintinnabulation" pretty well gives it away as Poe.

IX. Has to be Burns, right?

X. "camerados" would be a Whitman give-away.

Okay, are there arguments for other poets? And what about the ones I'm not seeing?

[Janet Kenny]

Meanwhile,
here is a clerihew by Anthony Butts:

Massenet

MASSENET
Never wrote a Mass in A.
It'd have been just too bad,
If he had.


An epigram by A. R. Ammons

Their Sex Life

One failure on
Top of another

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited July 18, 2007).]

[Jim Hayes]

Re the Ammons, I don't know if I'm happy or sad to see this I had something similar;

Their Sex Life

Two failures
back-to-back.

[Richard Epstein]

Mike,

Where did you get your text of the Clough? It is not at all the standard version. Cf., for example,
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-latest-decalogue/

or The Oxford Book of English Verse, which has 4 additional lines at the end, picked up from a later-found manuscript of the poem. In any event, yours varies from the version I know in almost every line. Can you point me at a text of yours?

Thanks.

RHE

[Mike Slippkauskas]

Richard,

Thank you for alerting me to this! In my zeal to cut and paste I posted the first version I googled. My Selected from Carcanet has your (better) version. The dangers of the Web. No idea on the origin of version posted.

Mike

[This message has been edited by Mike Slippkauskas (edited July 31, 2007).]