And now for something completely different. I think we could do with a bit of a cheering up after that last post, don't you? It is Friday after all, so time for another poem.
This one's a Petrarchan sonnet (iambic pentameter with an abba cde rhymescheme) this time. At the moment I can't get ten syllables into the second last line, so I am cheating a bit - any scansion experts feel free to leave me suggestions.
The basis of this poem is that I did my first degree at King's in London, a BA in English Language and Literature. This means I am a massive clunking pedant when it comes to wrongly-placed apostrophes and the like - few things can make me more enraged*. However, I am also a natural inhabitant of the internet, where new forms of speech, for example leetspeak, abound - and which I find hugely exciting. It's the pyscholinguistic part of my brain fighting with the sociolinguistic part. I fear there will be no survivors.
In the meantime, I wrote this to poke a bit of fun at my own pedantry:
Literature and Language
Exercise your brain, they say! And stave off
all time’s ravages, senility will
retract his ragged claws, and better still
you’ll tell the young ones they can all sod off
back to ploughing language’s threadbare trough
with txting, LOL!'s, and grammar errors shrill;
I mean, it’s quite enough to make one ill
but choose instead to look askance and scoff,
because, as you know best, the rules apply
from here to kingdom come, although I doubt
you still address your friends as thee or speak
as if upon the BBC, or cry
foul each apostropheric flout;
the stickler’s house of cards begins to creak.
*now we all know that this is a lie, as in fact most things have the capacity to enrage me in one way or another.
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