Re: Death in April / PJR / C&C


"Peter J Ross" <pjr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:slrne582uv.bst.pjr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Whee! Line-by-line comments!

On Sun, 30 Apr 2006 00:09:48 GMT, Karla <karlark@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
in rec.arts.poems:

On Fri, 28 Apr 2006 00:54:36 +0100, Peter J Ross <pjr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Death in April
--------------

Listening to Lennon, circa sixty-eight,
I mourn the lives I never had; or missed;
or learned, at Private School, I ought to hate;
or disingenuously faked, faked when pissed.

Grip, poet, grip again the sweaty dial
That clocks not hours but wrinkles in my skin:
Tell me again that death is but a trial;
Tell me my outspeech ought, should, might turn in.

The Magic Roundabout. Camberwick Green.
Roobarb and Custard. /These things I'll shore up./
I can't die, can I, if I'm always clean?
I can't die, can I, Lord, sharing this cup?




PJR :-)

Well, I'm glad my instincts were right about Roobarb and Custard. Onward
for more feedback.

Why capitalize "Private School"?

Because "Private School" is the prerequisite for "Public School",
which is a place like Eton or Harrow. Without the capital letters it
might be any place that charged fees and was outside the
state-controlled system. My narrator read about Lord Snooty in /The
Beano/ at a slightly posher school than I attended. Mine was a private
school, not a real genuine toffee-nosed *Private School*.

And "Private School" (with caps) is attended by small boys, not by
bigger, older boys.

They tend to be called "Prep Schools" nowadays.

I need to fix this vague cultural reference instead of trying to
defend it, don't I?

I'm suspicious of the first stanza's semicolons. An easy out is the
narrator makes you use them that way.

They're there for clarity, and for the sake of the pauses that I found
while reading aloud. Dashes might work, but I like the SCs. But the
punctation will probably have to be adjusted. *sigh* Why can't you
pedants just accept that it's a ~spiritual flow~ of my outpouring
~soul~? Eh?

Words like "mourn" and "outspeech" date the narrator. Or if the narrator
is
supposed to be present day, s/he holds on to a "Private School" diction.

The narrator resembles me in being rather old-fashioned.

I like how the narrator abandons listening to Lennon to "turn in" and
prop
up what's left with a self-mocking and at the same time serious "Grip,
poet, grip" and "is but a trial" and "that clocks not hours" and the
whole
last stanza, which a Merkin might call remembering The Velveteen Rabbit.

I could have used "Flash Gordon" or "Mister Benn". I bet Rob remembers
Mister Benn. I think that was my favourite TV show when I was about
eight.

IOW, I'm pushing some old-fartish British buttons here.

In your neighborhood is 'listening' two or three syllables?

Nearer two than three. I'd be reluctant to use the word at the end of
an IP line for an "-ing" rhyme, unless I wanted the rhyme to be very
weak.

It's fun to say "circa sixty-eight".

Am I supposed to resist weeping with the narrator at the end?

I hope it's a rather sad, suicidal piece, but I think I'll still be
alive in May.

After posting this, I took a volume of Larkin to bed, and I wept. It
occurs to me that my effort is little more than a variation on
Larkin's "A study of reading habits".

Ta muchly for the comments.


I lost any interest, when I read the big girls blouse posts revealing
him to be a hairy-faced weeping mysoginist, racist cyber-bully.
Probably irelevent, but reading our dreadful Brit tabloids yesterday
I found a report in The Daily Mail, of a study published in the British
Journal of Psychiatry. Liverpool University looked at 26916 suicides
reported in England and Wales between 1979 and 2001.
It found that those born in April and May were 17% more likely to
take their own life than those born in other months. The article then
detailed the theories- winter infections in mothers womb etc, lack
of natural light during winter, etc, leading to "programming" in the
foetus's functions etc.
Another, unrelated story, detailed a man who booked himself a
"birthday treat", a parachute lesson? And then this week on his
first jump, as he launched himself from the light aircraft, he removed
his safety helmet with the radio connection to his instructor, and then
cut the cords with a pair of scissors, and plunged to his death!
The article reported that the Police were treating the incident as
"suicide", and there were some small details of the man being a
"normal" privately educated young man who seemed to have no
worries?
So I was just wondering, anyone heard from the happy birthday
boy since these posts of his?


PJR :-)
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