Two light limericks for dark times

Limericks can lighten the load we all must bear, especially in these dark economic times. Here's an uplifting limerick contained in the book, Meter and Meaning: An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry.

There once was a diner at Crewe
   Who discovered a mouse in his stew.
   Said the waiter, "Don't shout
And wave it about,
Or the rest will be wanting one too!"

The traditional limerick contains one five-line stanza. Lines 1, 2, and 5 each contain about nine syllables and rhyme. In contrast, lines 3 and 4 contain either five or six syllables. They, too, rhyme, but differently from the other lines' rhyme.

The lines are usually anapaestic. An anapest contains three syllables: two unstressed (or short) syllables followed by a stressed (or long syllable), as in the word Halloween.

Here's another limerick. This one's by Edward Lear, an Englishman who was born in 1812.

There was an Old Person of Dover,
   Who rushed through a field of blue Clover;
   But some very large bees,
Stung his nose and his knees,
So he very soon went back to Dover.

Notice that in both limericks the first line introduces a person or place (Diner, Old Person) and its locale (Crewe, Dover).

Pen mightier than pellet

An adage written in 1839 is still true today. The adage is "The pen is mightier than the sword," authored by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

The writer's age doesn't appear to weaken a pen's power; nor does it matter if, in actuality, the "sword" is a BB gun.

In Oregon, Wisconsin, a father has been charged "with one felony count of child abuse" for shooting his 9-year-old son in the buttocks with a BB gun, a charge the father admits to. The boy was blocking the father's view of a television show and didn't respond quickly enough to the father's demand that he move.

County investigators learned of the shooting from the boy's elementary-school teacher. The boy wrote about the shooting incident in an essay the teacher assigned. The teacher turned the essay over to the investigators.

In the essay, the boy wrote that being struck by the BB pellet was "the most painful thing I ever felt in my life." The pellet effected a dime-sized welt.

The father has been charged with child abuse once before in 2005.

If convicted, the father can be sentenced to up to six years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Identifying a sentence's subject

Identifying a sentence's subject can sometimes be challenging. For example, in the sentence "During winter, snow falls," someone could believe that the subject is winter. However, while "winter" creates a context for interpreting the rest of the sentence, it is not the sentence's subject. The subject is "snow."

One way to identify a sentence's subject is by seeking it verbs. One definition of a verb defines verbs as "words that tell us what a subject does or is. The Macmillan Dictionary for Children defines a verb as "a word that describes an action, condition, or experience."

Fortunately, the sample sentence "During winter, snow falls" contains only one verb, "falls." The next task is to find what is falling: snow. That's the subject.

Sometimes, it's necessary to refer to some additional words besides the verb to locate the subject. In the sentence, "Sue is short," the task is to find who "is short," while in the sentence "Sally has the hiccups," the task is to identify who has the hiccups.

James Dickey, narrative poet

James Dickey was a highly skilled storyteller. He was a novelist (He wrote Deliverance) and the winner of a National Book Award in Poetry. His skill as a storyteller is revealed in his narrative poem, The Shark's Parlor. Below are its first five lines. (Note: To fit in the blog, the quoted lines' extra, internal spacing had to be eliminated.)

The Shark's Parlor

Memory: I can take my head and strike it on a wall on Cumberland Island
Where the night tide came crawling under the stairs came up the first
Two or three steps and the cottage stood on poles all night
With the sea sprawled under it as we dreamed of the great fin circling
Under the bedroom floor. In daylight there was my first brassy taste of beer


Its second line creates a striking image. The tide isn't just flowing under the stairs of a cottage, it's crawling under it. And as the water climbed the cottage stairs, a huge shark filled Dickey' sleep-mind, circling within it.

He doesn't use any fancy words, any words that require a reader to reference a dictionary, nor does he tie his words into knots that readers struggle to unravel. Instead, he relies on plain English to reveal life's complexity.

Contrary to Oscar Wilde's statement that "The truth is rarely pure and never simple," Dickey exposes life in its purest form while making its complexity transparent.

One part of the poem I found puzzling is his opening statement: "Memory: I can take my head and strike it on a wall." Is he talking to his memory? What bearing does that have on the poem? Most every home has walls against which someone can bang their head. What's the point of telling readers that?

A concise biography of Dickey's writing life is available here.

A poem with intriguing content

Philip Larkin was a twentieth-century English poet who favored writing in traditional forms. One poem that exemplifies his style is First Sight.

First Sight
by Philip Larkin

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air,
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth's immeasurable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.

This poem packs a lot of meaning into its 14 lines. Some of the ways its meaning is worded is quite creative, as in "wretched width of cold," but in others the intent isn't as clear. For example, he wrote "They could not grasp it if they knew." If you know something, it's illogical that you would not be able to grasp it.

It's interesting how, in the poem, Larkin sometimes seems to force his rhyme scheme. For example, in line 3, he inserted "know" at that end of the line after its final comma so that it rhymes with line 1. By doing that, he added a jerkiness to the line most evident when it's read aloud. I found it to be disruptive.

His rhyme scheme in both stanzas is one I hadn't encountered before: lines 1, 3, and 5 rhyme, as do 2 and 4, and 6 and 7.

Who's vetting whom in D.C.?

Here's a two-cinquain sequence dedicated to the current shenanigans in Washington.

Questionable Conduct

Daschle
joins Geithner in
pleading ignorance of
his huge fed income tax mistake.
Excuses.

If they
can't get their tax
returns right, maybe the
tax laws are what need amending. Or
Congress.