Cold comfort
Perchance it could soon be my fortune
To bid farewell to blind despair,
And wonder at this kingdom of the sun.
These lines are from a poem by my friend David, written - or rather composed - in 2001 using a fridge magnet kit comprising words and phrases culled from the collected works of Shakespeare.
The magnets were stuck on the door of my mum and dad's fridge. During one of my visits back to my family home he and I were selflessly idly away time in the kitchen, when for reasons lost in memory one of us suggested using the magnets to try and construct a full-length poem.
I'm hoping he won't mind me reproducing the results here. I know it can sometimes come across as incredibly self-aggrandising to plug the work of close friends online, especially if you try to make out it's epic poetry or the product of undiscovered genius. I know it can seem equally arrogant to assume that anybody else in the world will be at all interested in the work of somebody they know absolutely nothing about.
Yet this particular poem, given the curious nature of its birth, unusual lifespan (it remained on the fridge door for months, long after I'd returned to Liverpool) and improbably conception is, I'd like to think, deserving of a mention. Not least because I'd forgotten about it entirely, and only by David putting it up online himself did I recall its existence.
Anyway, here's the complete work, hailing from that distant summer of 2001, when the world seemed (in retrospect) a more surer place and I was far less wizened than I am now.
Wherefore the thought
Ask ne'er for mercy;
Only madness and golden midsummer straw.
Leave humility at the window,
And scorn frailty.
Laugh at thine sorrow;
Lost kisses die with haste,
Passion knoweth mercy nor reason,
But life will ever give chance and circumstance.
Love is sometimes a tempest
But always as sweet and noble
As winter ghosts drunk on dreams of summer.
Perchance it could soon be my fortune
To bid farewell to blind despair,
And wonder at this kingdom of the sun.
To bid farewell to blind despair,
And wonder at this kingdom of the sun.
These lines are from a poem by my friend David, written - or rather composed - in 2001 using a fridge magnet kit comprising words and phrases culled from the collected works of Shakespeare.
The magnets were stuck on the door of my mum and dad's fridge. During one of my visits back to my family home he and I were selflessly idly away time in the kitchen, when for reasons lost in memory one of us suggested using the magnets to try and construct a full-length poem.
I'm hoping he won't mind me reproducing the results here. I know it can sometimes come across as incredibly self-aggrandising to plug the work of close friends online, especially if you try to make out it's epic poetry or the product of undiscovered genius. I know it can seem equally arrogant to assume that anybody else in the world will be at all interested in the work of somebody they know absolutely nothing about.
Yet this particular poem, given the curious nature of its birth, unusual lifespan (it remained on the fridge door for months, long after I'd returned to Liverpool) and improbably conception is, I'd like to think, deserving of a mention. Not least because I'd forgotten about it entirely, and only by David putting it up online himself did I recall its existence.
Anyway, here's the complete work, hailing from that distant summer of 2001, when the world seemed (in retrospect) a more surer place and I was far less wizened than I am now.
Wherefore the thought
Ask ne'er for mercy;
Only madness and golden midsummer straw.
Leave humility at the window,
And scorn frailty.
Laugh at thine sorrow;
Lost kisses die with haste,
Passion knoweth mercy nor reason,
But life will ever give chance and circumstance.
Love is sometimes a tempest
But always as sweet and noble
As winter ghosts drunk on dreams of summer.
Perchance it could soon be my fortune
To bid farewell to blind despair,
And wonder at this kingdom of the sun.
posted by Alistair Myles at 10:15 am
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