Poet, Bard, and History of Limericks
Beginning with Epic Poetry.
Where Else?
The Sublime Poet, The Bard
The Bard? Shades of Shakespeare, in the same room with that august personage? What elevated company! Kathleen is in the same room with the poets, perhaps, but squashed against the corner in the back well behind Edward Lear, who (would it be rude to notice?) takes up a great deal of room.
In his role as mentor, the barmaid has come to care for the elderly gentleman, and therefore, has cut him off the fried jalapeño poppers he requests by the simple expedient of serving up carrots and celery with a low fat dip instead. He believes she has a hearing problem—the pub can be very loud.
History of Limericks
The Storyteller
Entertainment in BC was spare
Without televisions somewhere,
So the bard would impress
With fine stories, no less
Full of fiction than our daily fare.
A Reverent Bow to Homer
Homer, perhaps, was the first
Telling stories to slake boredom's thirst,
But never wrote down
The nuggets around
Which he spun all the poems he'd rehearsed.
The Serbian Bard Today
The Slavic bard does this today
To amazement of scholars who say
Every story, he'll alter
For memories falter
He inserts boilerplate as wordplay.
Kathleen, an autodidact who borrows from Edward’s extensive library of college courses on media, muddled through Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, in translation, of course. She could not help but notice fine phrases such as “rosy-fingered dawn,” “gray-eyed Athena,” or “Hector, tamer of horses” and found they functioned to make the meter fit when the poet found himself at a loss at the end of a line.
The same observation could be made for Beowulf, in which“the whale road” stands in for the sea, and other worthy examples that will have to wait for another review of Seamus Haney’s excellent translation of that work. Before Seamus, Kathleen would never have even attempted such a daunting task again (omitting the deplorable high school experience of that opus) but his book, together with the amusing and enlightening one by John Gardner titled Grendel,brought these tales within her ken.
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