The poem you are trying to think of which dances along to the same metre (a kind of rhymed Sapphic in general shape) is probably the one Byron sent his publisher complaining that other Lords (Oxford and Waldegrave) got better publishing contracts than he did. It ends:
But now this sheet is nearly cramm’d,
So, if you will, I shan’t be shamm’d,
And if you won’t, you may be damned,
My Murray.
Perhaps there are others. Some Spherean will surely know.
What I like about this, beyond its technical expertise and the goddam lilt of it, is its sheer inconsequentiality. Who the hell is PMN, for a start? Marshall, Shatski et al. – a quick trawl through google reveals to be men who have indeed written about innards. They would be (I suppose) gastro-enterologists.
Of course PMN could refer to the PMN count. The what? The polymorphonuclear count, you dummy. Your gastro-enterologist conducts such a count in cases, among others, of cirrhosis. Ahah! You should have laid off the sauce, good poet. You really should have. I hope all went well.
I do agree it is a mystery why doctors choose the specialisms they do. I knew a girl, a pretty girl too, the wife of the politician Robin Cook, who won the VD Medal at Edinburgh University. And what (except money of course) could ever prevail upon a medico to opt for dentistry?
It may be harder than I thought to find other examples of this stanza. Intensive googling came up only with the devout Charles H. Gabriel.
If I have craved for joys that are not mine,
If I have let my wayward heart repine,
Dwelling on things of earth, not things divine-
Good Lord, forgive!
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