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Re: Off topic: New Year's frivolity



** Reply to message from Patricia M Godfrey  on Mon, 3 Jan
2005 18:54:51 -0500


> Then I worked on it a bit to finish it off

You mean... you mean, this is P.M.Godfrey? I was wondering who it was. I was
looking for caesuras, or some interior secret scheme. The internal rhymes
threw me --

The MEASURE of our English speech is such
that anyone with very little care
can write blank verse. Not very good, I GRANT,
nor much to be esteemed, but still blank verse.
The five-foot line, the iamb's CONSTANT BEAT,
flow trippingly from off our tongues, our pens.
And quite WITHOUT our will or our INTENT,
we find WITHIN a passage MEANT as prose
a line, some FEET, or half a dozen more
of this the METER native of our tongue

Of course, my pen only "trips" when it is very very big, whereas your's trips
on the first four (really only three, self-proclaimed "not very good") lines;
but otherwise... I mean, nobody is making inordinately large claims for this
poesy, right? But still... not too shabby. What else has Godfrey written?

-----------------------------
Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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