A sonnet: fourteen pick-up lines in rhyme
From ugly-duckling poets to hot chicks.
The cygnet sonneteer cheeps it’s a crime
That Miss World’s not his but some other prick’s.
Petrarch wooed Laura, big-bosomed yet dainty;
Dante wanted Beatrice’s matchless calves;
Shakespeare, he craved both Fair Friend and Dark Lady –
The Bard was known to do nothing by halves.
Were ten syllables in five iambic feet
Really enough to impress a lady fair?
Did her heart pound to their pulsating beat?
Could fourteen lines like foreplay lay bare?
No – most sonnets to untouchable females
Went the way of unsolicited emails.
Großartige Reime, Herr Cherald, großartige Reime! But ze problem with you Englanders is zat you shtick ze cart before ze horse, so to shpeak: it is not ze poetry zat create ze love, but ze love zat create ze poetry! I bring you ze example of ze großartiger Cherman poet Goethe and his “Roman Elegies”. Follow his example and zis way you too may become ze "poet of love". Alles klar, Herr Cherald?
ReplyDeleteRoman Elegies V
I feel I’m happily inspired now on Classical soil:
The Past and Present speak louder, more charmingly.
Here, as advised, I leaf through the works of the Ancients
With busy hands, and, each day, with fresh delight.
But at night Love keeps me busy another way:
I become half a scholar but twice as contented.
And am I not learning, studying the shape
Of her lovely breasts: her hips guiding my hand?
Then I know marble more: thinking, comparing,
See with a feeling eye: feel with a seeing hand.
If my darling is stealing the day’s hours from me,
She gives me hours of night in compensation.
We’re not always kissing: we often talk sense:
When she’s asleep, I lie there filled with thought.
Often I’ve even made poetry there in her arms,
Counted hexameters gently there on my fingers
Over her body. She breathes in sweetest sleep,
And her breath burns down to my deepest heart.
Amor trims the lamp then and thinks of the times
When he did the same for his three poets of love.
Tausend Dankeschöns, Herr Johann. I had no idea old Wolfie was such a Latin lover! "Counted hexameters gently there on my fingers / Over her body" indeed! Gives a whole new meaning to his being honoured for "services to poetry". I can certainly learn a lot from anyone whose Catullan canticles are inspired by chesticles.
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