Willy-nilly silly

My twenty-five cent copy of Richard Armour's Punctured Poems: Famous First and Infamous Second Lines is doing a fine job of tickling my verrah sophisticated sense of humah. As you might gather from the title, Armour has taken first lines from some well-known poems and paired them with new second lines of his own creation. (My favorite, adapting Blake's "The Tiger": "Tiger! Tiger! burning bright,/ What has caused you to ignite?") The collection even includes these garden-themed couplets:

    I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
    I've stood in the sun, with a hose, for hours.
         (from Percy Bysshe Shelley, "The Cloud")

    A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot,
    But only if God wotters it a lot.
         (from Thomas Edward Brown, "My Garden")

    There is a garden in her face;
    She uses every inch of space.
         (from Thomas Campion, "Cherry-Ripe")

(If this blog be adjudged too silly, and this award misled in decision, I must acquiesce in its rescission, à la Milli Vanilli.)

Comments

[Mike]

Armour is a delight. See if you can find his "It All Started With ...." series (... Columbus, ... Eve, &c). I learned a lot of history from those books.

[Chan S.]

Yes! I don't have any books from that series, but I have enjoyed Armour's "The Classics Reclassified" for many years. ("The Scarlet Letter: an A for effort".) I'll frown on any use of Cliff's Notes by my kids, but they will be encouraged to enjoy Armour.

[Patricia Tryon]

Hahahaha!

I'm having great fun with the Dysfunctional Family Christmas Songbook: "Oh, what a fight, the fists were really flying..."

;-)

[Chan S.]

Hilarious! I'll practice singing "Oh, what a fight" in my very best Pavarotti...