The sneering detractors

And human nature being what it is, guess what was the first thing I clicked on?

Homer in Classical Greek would defeat most of us, as would Beowulf in Old English, but verse doesn't have to be like that. I can do The Shooting Of Dan McGrew by Robert Service, quite a few of Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads and a number of the Stanley Holloway monologues - and I've not noticed audiences (when I get 'em ) thinning out. Maybe they're just polite, or maybe it helps to do stuff that's in accessible vernacular language.

Edited By Mick B1 on 26/05/2020 10:16:04

Second vote for Kipling, and a vote for Burns ,(although strip him of the faux Burns Society tat please).

I grow old... I grow old...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair from behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

For I have heard the mermaids calling, each to each.

TS Eliot for me. (From The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.)

Edited By Hopper on 26/05/2020 11:14:14

This is why I love this site! From carpers, through Latin to poetry - what a great bunch you are!

I like to brows now and again, but would end up filling all my mangling time if I followed it all.

Mike

or She sits in the Cabbages and Leeks

by Nanny Ogg.

;o)

Martin

Ho yus! I can do some of these:

"Drake is in his hammock and a thousand miles away" - I learned that for a singing exam. No idea who wrote the words or the music, but I got Grade 6 with Merit...

"Come into the garden, Maud, for the black bat, night, is flown" - a parlour song I learned for one of our amateur Music Hall evenings. I was shocked later to find that Balfe had only set four verses of Tennyson's poem, which runs to 24 pages of 8-point print, largely in double columns. I've really no idea why he didn't set the verse which starts "When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee..."

And my favourite, which I can quote in its entirety:

I wandered lonely as a cloud down our No-Entry street,

When all at once, from up above, appeared a pair of feet.

And from the skies an angel came, and shouted from the roof:

"I wish to God that I could have just one good cloven hoof!"

I don't know who wrote it, but it was published in our school magazine in about 1963.

George B.