In the season that followed the flood
When the world was in bloom, or in bud,
Mrs Noah complained
‘Since this planet got drained
My husband’s been stuck in the mud.’
All too often the wife feels sidelined during the enaction of a Manly Project, and finds it difficult to empathise with the exhaustion and ennui experienced by the husband when it’s over. The more so, when every other creature within eye- and ear-shot has gone forth to multiply with a vengeance.
At Oxford I’d very few vices
And strove to avoid any crisis
Unlike AJP Taylor,
The soi-disant ‘sailor’,
Who scuppered my punt on the Isis.
While we’ll never know whether Taylor sank this vessel deliberately, we can be quite certain that, even in the golden days of the Twentieth Century, any man of letters attracted gossip and rumour. Today, it would be threats of hanging or violation at the very least.
Adrift on the old river Niger,
Just me and the prophet Elijah
And a Woman in White
Who likes watching men fight –
So we take it in turns to oblige her.
Some ‘Sunday fools’ still believe spirits move among us, and a few, perhaps, suppose that they’re prepared to conspire with mortals in illogical, Lawrentian pacts. But what we’re really investigating here is the troubling, antiquated trope of Objectified Woman as Muse. Perhaps she is a spirit too?
‘Come sailing?’ said Frankie to Johnny.
‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Can I bring Connie?’
As old ballads tell us
When F. got quite jealous
That picnic went right down The Swanee.
‘This story has no moral, this story has no end. This story only goes to show that there ain’t no good in men’. ‘No, nor women neither.’ It all hinges on the word ‘jealous’. No doubt tabloid readers will judge Bisexual Temptress Connie the guiltiest of the three.
In her self-designed submarine, Sybil
Has been dredged from the depths of the Ribble.
When the river burst in
Through its rice-paper skin
It was very much more than a dribble.
Characteristic press prejudice ensures that this tragedy of the female pioneer, engulfed in her own creation, is much less widely reported than, say, the sinking of RMS Titanic, a male creation with similar design faults.
An affluent actor from Alnwick,
In his stateroom aboard The Titalnwick
When the tragedy strok,
Gave his ‘Running Amok’
Amidst plain, proletarian palnwick.
Privileged panic is art; plebeian panic is mere lack of self-control. RMS Titanic sank 108 years ago tomorrow. (While almost a third of the human passengers survived, only a quarter of the dogs did. No wonder they hate us.)
When Gandhi set sail on the Lea
And fancied some tadpoles for tea
The beadle of Broxbourne
Brought five pints of frogspawn
And charged but one single rupee.
Jesus’s supposed UK excursion is celebrated in song all over Britain (‘And did those feet‘ etc); whereas Gandhi’s teatime outing on a relatively-obscure Thames tributary is commemorated only in this five-line fragment. Likewise the generosity of Hertfordshire officialdom.
On his water-skis, down the St Lawrence,
Hurtled John, the Archbishop of Florence;
First his wires became crossed,
Then his halo got lost.
Soon he gave himself up to the torrents.
Factually this new river-piece may seem problematic, fraught as it is with lies and nonsense. Symbolically, however, we find The Baptist succumbing to the immersion on which his fame rested, and note in passing how the foolhardy loss of any churchman’s reputation (cf the halo, above) habitually presages self-extinction.
Preparing predictions for Pisces
One pictures poor souls on the high seas
Awash on a raft
Or some other frail craft
Facing icebergs as far as the eye sees.
Waking this morning under the zodiacal sign of the fish, I feel convinced that the astrologer is an expert on whom we can still rely in troubled times.
Vacationing in The Bahamas
Misfortune befell the Obamas.
On the night she forgot
Where they’d anchored their yacht
A crocodile stole his pyjamas.
It’s a question of scale, no?